Home for the Holidays

It is not that easy to pin down the genre of Home for the Holidays, which is about the kind of holiday family gatherings that many people love but just as many hate. The film can be defined as a mixture of comedy and drama.

On the very day that painting restorer Claudia Larson is to travel home for Thanksgiving with her parents, she is fired from her job and learns from her teenage daughter Kitt that the latter intends to lose her virginity while her mother is away. The day is off to a great start!

Thanksgiving with the Larson family is hopefully not representative, for it is far from pure idyll! There is friction between the three siblings, Claudia and the gay Tommy on one side and the hysterical Joanne on the other. The disagreements burst into flames when Tommy, more or less on purpose, tips the turkey into Joanne's lap and gets into an open fistfight with Joanne's humourless husband Walter. Aunt Gladys declares her love for her sister's husband, and mother Adele tries to marry Claudia off to the town's biggest pessimist, Russell.

In the midst of the family drama, however, a little romance unfolds between Claudia and Tommy's guest Leo Fish. Not everything is sheer misery, though, for it seems as if the little family squabbles are part of the tradition.

I cannot claim that I was bored during the film, but afterwards it felt strangely unsatisfying. Its indefinability meant that I didn't really know what to make of it.