Home Again
Watching Home Again is like sitting through five back-to-back episodes of a ’90s sitcom. It’s a bit much to ask audiences to spend their hard-earned money to experience something they could easily digest on the small screen, but that alone shouldn’t be an automatic indictment of this well-meaning, but eventually wrongheaded, rom-com. The problem with director and writer Hallie Myers-Sheyer’s film is that it just blandly presents all of the expected cliches of the genre without anything really new or unique to say. Here’s a film, released in 2017, that is so unaware of any modernization of the genre during the last three decades, that the climax actually hinges on, without any irony or subversion, whether or not the protagonists will be on time to watch one of the kids perform in a school play. Add a mad dash through an airport to tell the love interest how you feel about them, and you hit the stale rom-com bingo.
The sitcom comparisons don’t refer simply to the premise, about a 40-year-old single mother who invites three plucky 20-something boys to live in her guest house (and wouldn’t you know it, the boys teach the mother how to loosen up, and the mother inspires the boys to become more responsible), but to the execution: the flat, dull, evenly-lit cinematography, the muggy performances, the forced wacky misunderstandings, the unearned schmaltz, all the way down to the wispy, detergent commercial score. All are there to force the audience to wish for the good old days when a blowjob was enough to impeach a president.
This time around, the rom-com single mother archetype who’s supposed to come across as depressed and dumpy, yet who somehow always manages to maintain perfect hair, make-up, and fashion sense, is Alice (Reese Witherspoon). She’s moved to her late art house filmmaker father’s home in LA after separating from her workaholic husband (Michael Sheen), and is now trying to get her life back together.