HOME FIRES FIZZLING
Lazy romantic comedy tries for more warmth than it is capable of producing
There’s a world of difference between a film that gets under your skin and one that just gets on your nerves. Home Again, a mostly inoffensive rom-com, strives mightily to be likable, but time and again I found it bugging me by degrees. If this movie were a first date, it would have spinach in its teeth and be constantly checking its phone.
Reese Witherspoon is in fullon Mom mode as Alice Kinney, who has split from her husband (Michael Sheen) and is raising two kids in what used to be her parents’ rambling L.A. mansion. At the urging of friends, she parties heartily on her 40th birthday, and winds up in the arms of 27-year-old Teddy (Nat Wolff ).
Teddy is a filmmaker. So are his two tagalong best friends (Pico Alexander and Jon Rudnitsky). In fact, everyone in this movie seems to be connected with the business — no surprise when you consider that first-time writerdirector Hallie Meyers-Shyer is the daughter of five-timer Nancy Meyers (The Holiday, It’s Complicated) and too-many-tocount Charles Shyer (Father of the Bride).
So that would explain Home Again’s fetishization of the film world: Alice’s childhood home contains a room full of her late father’s notebooks, original screenplays and Oscar statues. And her mother is Lillian Stewart, a beauty and actress much younger than her late husband — or in other words, Candice Bergen playing herself.
After that one crazy night — and with a little prodding from Lillian — Alice decides to let Teddy and his friends stay in her guest house. One of the pals is a tech wizard, while the other bonds with Alice’s daughter, helping the kid come out of her shell and become a writer, because really what other career options are available in this movie? Alice tries to be responsible and keep Teddy at arm’s length, while on the other side of the country Sheen’s character frets and wonders whether he and Alice should reconcile.
Meyers-Shyer deserves credit for creating an older-womanyounger-man romantic entanglement and making it both warm and believable, but she squanders this good will on some lazy screenwriting. To wit, I counted at least five scenes in which characters are clearly speaking to one another, but rather than hear what they have to say and learning more about them, we are treated to a blanket of bland pop music instead.
By the third use of this technique, the film started to feel more like a beer commercial than a comedy. And in one instance, though we can’t hear what’s he saying, Teddy is clearly talking over a movie the characters are watching projected on a sheet in the backyard. How would you feel if I treated you this way, Home Again?
Thus grumpified, I was less than forgiving when the film introduces a parody of a movie producer only to have one of the characters shake his head and say: “He was a parody of a movie producer.” Well of course he was! And this after we get Lake Bell as the parody of an annoying homedecor client, and a scene in which Alice has a parody of a bad dinner date. Not to mention the parody rendition of “will X make it to Y’s school recital on time?”
Meyers-Shyer must have spent a lot of time on film sets growing up — her credits include bit parts in her parents’ movies — but the movie moments in this one feel like someone who only knows the business from afar.
I’m reminded of a scene in the 2008 film Rachel Getting Married, in which two men square off over who’s better at loading the dishwasher. It’s a memorable bit, but it’s also drawn from real life: writer Jenny Lumet is the daughter of director Sidney Lumet, and as a child witnessed her dad and choreographer Bob Fosse having a dish-off during a dinner party. The closest Home Again comes to that kind of personal touch is a parody of a personal touch. The audience deserves better. cknight@postmedia.com twitter.com/chrisknightfilm