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F big-screen raunch fests about girls behaving badly have become the rule ( Rough Night, Girls Trip and others), Home Again is the exception: a femaledriven comedy so thoroughly sanitised that it’s essentially wiped of personality.
A wan star vehicle for Reese Witherspoon, whose sharp, emotionally-layered turn in HBO’s recent Big Little Lies ranks with her best, Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s directorial debut is also a feeble stab at romantic screwball – a bland simulacrum of the cinematic comfort food her parents, Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, have been serving up over the past few decades.
That comparison would be unfair if Home Again weren’t so conspicuously working from mom’s recipe, especially (Meyers is one of the film’s producers). The ingredients are all here, most notably an attractive, affluent protagonist with a pile of First World problems and a drool-worthy home.
Home Again is like a feature-length sitcom sans laughs. It may find an audience – if ever the timing were right for a feel-good fantasy, it would be now – but viewers deserve more from their escapist fluff.
It’s no secret that romantic comedy is a genre in crisis. Examples, of late, are scarce, with the best benefiting from bold, specific narrative hooks (a Muslim-American handling his ex-girlfriend’s health scare in The Big Sick; the Obamas’ first date in Southside With You; a porn addict’s adventures in monogamy in Don Jon) or dominant comic personae (Chris Rock in Top Five, Amy Schumer in Trainwreck). Home Again doesn’t fall into either of those categories.
Witherspoon is a force of an actress with near-flawless timing, but rom-coms are not her natural habitat; they too often require her to dull the edges and spikes that make her a distinctive performer in the first place. And rarely has that been as true as in this pic.
Witherspoon plays Alice, the daughter of a famous film-maker, now deceased. The mother of two little girls, Alice has just turned 40 and moved back to Los Angeles from New York after separating from husband Austen (Michael Sheen). Reese Witherspoon and Nat Wolff in a scene from
She and the kids are living in her childhood house, a gorgeous Spanish-style number with a massive courtyard, splendid fountain and orange trees in full bloom.
But Alice is unhappy and, true to the Meyers template, it’ll take a man to set things right. Or three men, as is the case here.
Aspiring director Harry (Pico Alexander), his aspiring actor brother Teddy (Nat Wolff) and their aspiring writer friend George (Jon Rudnitsky) are a trio of twentysomethings who get booted from their Hollywood apartment and hit up a bar one night to drown their sorrows.
That’s where they cross paths with Alice. After a bit of dirty dancing, our heroine ends up in bed with Harry, the prettiest, most confident of the three. Things don’t go entirely as planned and the next morning, Alice finds that Teddy and George have crashed on the couch.
When Alice’s mom, Lillian (Candice Bergen), stops by, she bonds with the boys and suggests they move into the guest house; they’re broke, so they accept.
The rest of Home Again plays out precisely as you expect: Alice gets her groove back through her affair with Harry, while the dudes try to make it in Hollywood without compromising their, um, artistic integrity.
There are hiccups and hitches along the way: Harry gets caught up having drinks with some producers and misses a date with Alice; Alice struggles to kick her interior decorating career into high gear; Austen reappears and tries to win Alice back.
Narrative formulas can be a source of pleasure, but part of what makes Home Again such a snooze is that very little feels at stake.