HOME ALONE
A film review by Greg Goebel
Copyright 1990 Greg Goebel
I am a little leery of John Hughes films ... Hughes' movies seem to be exclusively devoted to the topic of comfortable-middle-class- white-American family life--not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, it's just that when it's not properly handled it's about as interesting as Wonder Bread. But good reviews tempted me to see HOME ALONE--and I didn't regret it.
Okay, in praising this film I have to throw out a number of warnings: This is a "feel-good" Christmas film with a nice neat homey message; it's a candy-cane and Christmas-tree-ornament sort of movie ... "great" it "ain't." But that said, it is fairly impressive that Hughes and Chris Columbus could piece together such a movie with such craft that it not only avoids nauseating the audience but actually gets them rolling in the aisles at times.
The premise is simple: two families with hot-and-cold running kids are taking off for Paris for Christmas. One of the boys--eight-year-old Kevin--gets everybody mad at him the night before they leave, so he's sent up to the attic bedroom to cool off. There's a power outage during the night, the clocks are all knocked out, a mad scramble follows in the morning, and due to the confusion (and a slight case of mistaken identity) they all drive off ... without Kevin.
Well, more than that I will not say, but the resulting story deftly weaves together a plot with a number of subplots--a mean-looking neighbor, a tarantula, a very bad old videotape, and two nasty burglars who not only like stealing everything in sight but trashing everything when they leave--with considerable economy into a smooth-running whole. The boy who plays Kevin is very good, starting out as a peevish brat and then evolving to a new self-reliance and even a little Gizmo-Rambo militancy.
Okay, entirely plausible it's not, but this is the movies, right? When HOME ALONE gets rolling it achieves a Looney Tunes sense of timing, and there is a fairly good sense of wit through the entire film. Call it John Hughes / Chris Columbus as Steve Spielberg / Joe Dante. And even if there is a message it is administered gracefully enough so that at the very worst you won't mind it too awfully much ... and maybe if you're corny enough in your heart of hearts you will nod your head and smile.
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