‘Home for the Holidays’ at 25: The Thanksgiving Movie That Has Everything

Early in Home for the Holidays, when she’s been back in the house she grew up in for just a few short hours, Claudia Larson (Holly Hunter) gets a momentary shock when she learns from her acerbic, overbearing mother Adele (Anne Bancroft) that her sister Joanne (Cynthia Stevenson) is bringing her own prized bird to Thanksgiving dinner the next day. 

“Wait a minute,” Claudia says, “we’re not doing the turkey?”

Adele, cigarette in hand, almost can’t be bothered with a reply.

“Of course we are. I’m doing my bird, she’s doing hers,” she says. “Don’t ask.”

Home for the Holidays, Jodie Foster’s second feature as a director, is full of little moments like this one, whether they’re coming from Adele, Claudia, Larson family patriarch Henry (Charles Durning in top form), or Claudia’s manic brother Tommy (Robert Downey Jr.), and they all speak to the reasons the film still stands as the ultimate Thanksgiving movie even as it turns 25 this year. It’s often tough to say what we want out of a Thanksgiving film that we couldn’t also get from a Christmas movie or even a sweeping family drama stripped of a particular marker on the calendar. What is there to articulate about a holiday that is, at best, about eating too much and watching football and, at worst, about the lingering impact of colonialism? What do we actually need from a Thanksgiving movie?

Whatever it is, Home for the Holidays has it, and it achieves it by offering up the kind of messy, overstuffed, conflict-riddled meal many of us recognize from Thanksgivings past. It’s the Thanksgiving movie that has a little bit of everything, and yet somehow manages to use that sense of constant overload to find a poignant, touching focus in the end.

The “I’m doing my bird, she’s doing hers” approach to the Thanksgiving holiday is both an acknowledgment of tension among the Larson family and a sort of mission statement for the entire smorgasbord that Foster is about to lay out for us, and Adele’s “don’t ask” serves as both a warning and a dare. Claudia, the viewer’s entry point into this wild holiday world, has just returned home for Thanksgiving after losing her job and leaving her daughter to stay with friends, and she’s returned to find her exuberant father is driving her mother crazy, her sainted sister is being just a little too holier-than-thou, her eccentric aunt is somehow even more eccentric than she remembered, and her parents are still trying to set her up with the guy who fixes the furnace. Then of course, there’s Tommy, who arrives home like a dervish without his husband, traveling instead with a mysterious new friend named Leo Fish (Dylan McDermott), who seems just a little too comfortable amid the Larson clan. It’s all heaped on Claudia’s plate at once, like a Thanksgiving feast bigger than her stomach, and she’s left to process it even as she still hasn’t processed how the still-fresh wounds in her life truly affect her. 

Another film might take this absolute sense of overload and turn it into a saccharine, post-turkey nap of a movie, or perhaps skew in the other direction and make it a ponderous, plodding drama, with either approach eventually trying to get at the “true meaning” of Thanksgiving and what Claudia is truly thankful for. Thankfully for all of us, Foster and screenwriter W. D. Richter are too smart for that. 

Instead, the film because a story about how this is all too much, about how the “I’m doing my bird, she’s doing hers” approach can only sustain itself for so long before it explodes at the Thanksgiving table in a shower of laughter and poultry juice. Claudia isn’t meant to make sense of it, isn’t supposed to heal wounds, isn’t destined to have some grand epiphany about the nature of life and thankfulness based on the 36 or so hours of madness the film documents. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t. This film has just about everything a mid-90s family drama could possibly deliver. It’s got Adele’s dry wit, Leo Fish’s mysterious romantic presence, Tommy pulling pranks, Joanne letting her homophobia spill over onto the dinner table, snotty kids, a football game gone wrong, an old high school friend who think she’s better than everyone, two turkeys, an aunt who’s basically made her house plants her children, and more, and it’s not even two full hours long. How could on person possibly digest all of that, whether they’re in the story or simply watching it?

Our answer – after the two turkeys, and the fighting, and the pie and the leftovers and the romantic subplots – comes near the end of the film, when for the first time Home for the Holidays offers a quiet moment. Henry and Claudia sit in the basement together, and the musing father reminds his daughter of a moment when she was little, and he took her to watch a plane take off, and while the rest of the family shrank back from the sound and the force, she was “fearless.” It’s a moment that Claudia calls “a drop in the bucket,” perhaps 10 seconds of their collective lives, but it hangs in the air like the aroma of a great meal that’s long since been devoured, one last morsel worth savoring. 

That’s really what we want out of Thanksgiving, even amid all the calls to gorge ourselves on everything from family gossip to pumpkin pie. We want a drop in the bucket that we want to preserve in amber amid all the rest of it that we know we can’t digest, and we’ll sample a little bit of everything our loved ones have to offer in exchange. It’s a bittersweet, challenging realization about the commercialized, over-mythologized, Normal Rockwell ideal of the holiday, but it’s true enough that even if you don’t agree with it, Home for the Holidays will still leave an impression. And as for the rest of it, well: “Don’t ask.”

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire whose work has appeared at Syfy Wire, Mental Floss, Looper, Playboy, and Uproxx, among others. He lives in Austin, Texas, and he’s always counting the days until Christmas. Find him on Twitter: @awalrusdarkly.

Watch Home For The Holidays on Starz