The One Where I Ruin Some People’s Christmas
Home Alone (1990) – In the chaos of trying to get two families
ready for a Christmas trip to Paris, Kevin gets lost in the shuffle.
While his family struggles to get back home, Kevin lives like a king,
including the need to defend his home against invaders.
Directed by Chris Columbus
Starring Macaulay
Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, John Heard, John Candy, Catherine
O’Hara
Why I Liked It –
In bursts, it’s brilliant.
Oh, some of you
are about to get really mad at me! This movie shows up with
regularity as one of the great modern Christmas movies. It’s a
classic according to many fans. Blah, blah, blah.
For me?
It’s just OK.
Grab your
pitchfork, light the brands, label me the Grinch, I stand by the
assessment. It feels like two different movies are trapped together
in this script. One is a classic, heart warming story of Christmas,
redemption, and love. The other is a slapstick comedy. Some
sections of each story are wonderful. But the rest? It never hits
the mark for me.
Let’s start
with the beginning of the movie. I hope that no fan of “Home
Alone” has ever criticized “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or
“A Charlie Brown Christmas” for the mean-spirited way the main
characters are treated by family and friends. Because both of those
shows look like “It’s A Wonderful Life” in comparison to
Kevin’s family here. I watched the first ten minutes or so
thinking “I thought this was a comedy”. The McCallister extended
family are vicious, and the action hinges on one of those pieces of
awfulness when Kevin is sent to the attic for “misbehavior”.
They then appear to perform ONE check that all the kids are with them
(there are 11!), then leave them unattended in Economy while the
adults drink champagne in First Class. In fact, Kevin may be the
only decent person in the family (his parents are inattentive at
worst, I’ll grant that. His uncle should be banned from polite
society). His siblings and cousins are caricatures here of brats.
Arguably, the BEST thing that happens to Kevin is his nasty family
leaves him alone to enjoy life for a few days.
Kevin at home
could have been the heart of the warm, cheery version of the story.
He discovers the sting of aftershave, sings a little song or two,
faces down the evils of the basement, goes shopping. Caulkin is
charming here, but the story isn’t going anywhere. It’s just
filling time till the slapstick takes over.
With Pesci and
Stern playing the burglars trying to rob the McCallister home, you’ve
got a great set up for the mayhem to come. The script wastes time
with an extended recon of the house that delays the part most fans
are waiting for, the master class in strategy the eight-year-old hero
has for the bad guys. That whole section is slapstick classic humor.
The two adults are brilliant and you can help but root for the young
defender. The problem is that the war descends into some pretty
nasty stuff at times. I don’t think it ever goes over the edge,
but there’s a fair amount of time spent peering over that edge.
The story line
with the reclusive neighbor gets the barest of nods. It’s too bad,
Roberts Blossom is wonderful, per usual. It looks and feels like a
throw in, feel good subplot that neither the script nor the director
was really committed to. It would have made a brilliant coda in the
warm and fuzzy version of the story.
When the credits
rolled, I struggled to come up with a way to summarize the movie. I
came up with this: It’s a Frank Capra meets the Three Stooges
movie. Sadly, it would have been so much better as one or the other.
“Home Alone”
was the highest grossing domestic movie of the year. You can stream
it on Disney+, YouTube, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Starz, Sling TV,
Philo, YouTube TV
Stories Are My Life 
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