Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Pico Alexander, Jon Rudnitsky
Directed by: Hallie Meyers-Shyer (debut)
Written by: Hallie Meyers-Shyer (debut)
I guess there’s an audience for the kind of movie “Home Again†is—a fluffy tale of a rich white woman in her 40s who, while more than comfortably wealthy, is struggling to start some basic bitch-type job like design or decorating for other latte-and-wine-sipping women, who then encounters decent men so saccharine, the woman invents problems to have with them, turning the guy missing a dinner (due to life-changing career opportunities, no less!) into a betrayal tantamount to infidelity. Oh, and don’t forget the woman’s adorably plucky daughters and her no-nonsense mother!
That audience doesn’t include me. But if the large contingent of women in their late 30s to late 40s that showed up to the screening I attended and laughed at every hackneyed joke and hissed at every extremely mild bad thing a man did, well…who am I to judge?
Oh, yeah, a film critic.
Anyway, “Home Again†opens with a flashback montage narrated by Alice Kinney (Reese Witherspoon) as she remembers her late father, a philandering, genius director of romantic comedies in the ‘70s who fell in love with his leading lady Lillian (Candice Bergen), a pairing which begat Alice. His immaculate Los Angeles bungalow is now Alice’s, and she uses the home as ground zero for a fresh start with her two daughters after her marriage to record executive Austen (Michael Sheen) and fleeing New York City.
While out celebrating her 40th (oh no!) birthday, Alice runs into three good-as-gold 20-something filmmakers (Pico Alexander, Jon Rudnitsky and Nat Wolff), fresh off a hit short at SXSW out in L.A. to make it big—and due to sitcom-like circumstances, they all end up living in Alice’s opulent, well-furnished guest house. As the film chugs along to tinkly piano beats, Alexander’s director, Harry, falls for Alice and they begin a mildly naughty sexual relationship, while Rudnitsky’s writer, George, takes to Alice’s neurotic aspiring writer daughter, becoming her mentor. Meanwhile, Wolff’s actor character, Teddy, remains present in a lot of scenes without really doing anything. Conflict only arises artificially, though, when amazing career advancement opportunities come up for one character that mildly inconveniences another—Harry meeting with producers causes him to miss a dinner with Alice, George takes on a script polishing job, Teddy reads for a pilot, and Harry gets pissed because…I don’t know, he’s an auteur? Oh yeah, then Michael Sheen shows up to reclaim Alice from these young whippersnappers, and…eh.
Written and directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer, who herself is the daughter of romantic comedy directors Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, “Home Again†isn’t far off from her mother’s output—and weirdly ignorant of how actual one might be successful as a filmmaker in Hollywood. You know, if your parents aren’t successful filmmakers and give you a hand up in the business. And it’s also weird that you’d let three men–complete strangers, sort of a diet “Entourage†crew—shack up with you, as a single woman, with two elementary school age daughters just because your daffy old mom suggested you be a “patron of the arts.†There is no home in “Home Again,†at least not one that exists in any other world but the Meyers-Shyer family.