HOUSEKEEPING
A film review by Jeff Meyer
Copyright 1988 Jeff Meyer
Here in Seattle, HOUSEKEEPING is being advertised, first and foremost, as a Bill Forsythe film; images of his past works--GREGORY'S GIRL, LOCAL HERO, and COMFORT AND JOY--are promoted in the trailers, and you might well think that HOUSEKEEPING will be more of the same: a slightly spacey, gentle comedy. It is spacey at times, and there are prevalent elements of humor (more of them towards the beginning), but it is more of character study than anything. Two young sisters are left with their grandmother before their mother commits suicide. The two girls grow up in very small lumber town near Spokane, until their grandmother dies when they are entering high school. Then their aunt, played with distracted charm by Christine Lahti, moves into the house to take care of the girls. However, her casual, undisciplined manner fails to provide much of a structure for the girls, and the older sister begins to rebel against her Aunt's eccentricities--she wants a more normal lifestyle. The shyer younger sister, Ruthie (who is the narrator of the film), finds her aunt more appealing, and a friendship begins to develop after a time--thus causing friction between the sisters, who have only had each other to depend on before this.
As I said, there is humor here--Lahti's odd antics often bring out a smile. But there is a lot of sadness here, too, and something of pain; Ruthie's ostracization from her sister is particularly resonant. And Forsythe tries to get in all sides of each of the characters; one understands, even accepts as valid, the position of the elder sister; and the townspeople, while narrow-minded, are shown as primarily kindly-- which makes their final persecution more distressing.
In short, I enjoyed this film greatly, but would not recommend it to everyone I know--those who are looking for a standard Forsythe comedy should look elsewhere. If you don't mind a slow pace and can enjoy carefully-crafted characters coming of age in a remote setting, then I think you'll find it a rewarding film.
A question to those who read the book: does it end so abruptly in the novel? Please send E-mail to me, or put a SPOILER warning in the subject line, so as not to spoil the ending for others. Thank you.
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
INTERNET: moriarty@tc.fluke.COM
Manual UUCP: {uw-beaver, sun, allegra, hplsla, lbl-csam}!fluke!moriarty
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews