STEALING HOME
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1988 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Can spoiled rich kid Billy Wyatt take only a half-step in downward mobility by playing minor league baseball, or will he spend the rest of his life living with cocktail waitresses in motels. Can he decide what to do with the ashes of the only woman who ever really meant anything to him? Does anyone really care? Nicely photographed, well edited, but diffuse. Rating: 0.
STEALING HOME is the story of Billy Wyatt at three times in his life. Billy remembers the story in a set of flashbacks as he remembers the woman who was his best friend and his greatest inspiration. She is Katie Chandler (played by Jodie Foster) who back when Billy was ten was his 16-year-old babysitter. The intermixed flashbacks, moving forward and backward in time, follow his memories of his learning of her suicide six months earlier and of her bewildering request that it be him who decides what to do with her ashes. That established, Billy starts thinking about his whole relationship with Katie. We see Billy as a boy, as a teenager, and as a man as he pieces together his history with her, culminating in the all-important decision(?) of where to sprinkle her oxidized remains. Of course, the decision of whether he will live all this life off his wealthy mother's money--do you believe Blair Brown of ALTERED STATES and CONTINENTAL DIVIDE is already playing a mother with a grown son?--or whether he grow up and make something of himself by playing minor league baseball is also important.
I cannot say this film has a whole lot of anything. For the teenage- Billy scenes, STEALING HOME tastes a little like SUMMER OF '42 concentrate. It seems that Billy's best friend is infatuated with a woman he sees on the beach and, under cover of dark each night, he goes to stare in her bedroom window. It is not really clear what all this has to do with Billy's relationship with Katie, but then Billy's reminiscences do not seem to be coming from a well-ordered mind and if they didn't get off the subject there would not be enough material here to fill a full-length film.
Just as the story is a bit diffuse, so are Mark Harmon's and William McNamara's performances as Billy, man and boy. Trying to play a sort of worldly teen and woman, Jodie Foster is not going to be impressing anyone. This is a film that is as soft and sweet as a bowl of Maypo. Recommended to nostalgiphiles only. Rate it a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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