by Frank Calvillo
There’s a scene in the 1999 romantic comedy The Story of Us starring Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer in which the former, a writer, is pitching an idea about telling the story of his grandmother’s life, including her immigrating to America, raising a gaggle of children and making ends meet when money was forever tight. Willis’s agent, played by Paul Reiser, gently states that unless she at one time performed oral sex on someone famous, people couldn’t care less about a dead grandmother. It’s a hilarious scene which works surprisingly well when thinking about the 1993 Kathy Bates drama A Home of Our Own, a prime example which proves that not everyone’s story, regardless of how powerful it may seem, has the ability to sustain a feature-length movie. The truth of the matter is that sometimes all the necessary ingredients fail to come together.
Based on a true story, A Home of Our Own stars Bates as Frances Lacey, a widowed mother raising six kids (including Edward Furlong as Shayne, her eldest) in 1950s America. Tired of having her children live in a run down apartment, Frances packs up her family and heads to the midwest where she discovers a partially constructed house she is sure will be their permanent home. After negotiating a deal with the property’s owner, Mr. Munimura (Soon-Tek Oh), Frances and her kids set about making the house their own. The task won’t be easy however, as the Laceys encounter a number of setbacks which test their faith, but never Frances’s resilience.
A Home of Our Own is one of those films where virtually every possible hardship in the book is ticked off the list. Every heart tugging movie device is put out there in the most shamelessly sentimental of ways. The most blatant and unnecessary of these is when one of Frances’s younger children falls off a ladder and onto a board with nails sticking out out it. We then see Shayne carrying his brother to the nearest hospital miles away where the child is eventually declared OK. It’s these kind of scenes which make most every second of the film feels so incredibly clichéd and trite, especially when it comes to the main character. There are scenes of Frances being proud, scenes of her being angry, scenes of her being desperate and finally, scenes of her being so close to losing it, but holding it together regardless. “I’ll manage. I always do,” Frances states with gusto to a potential employer. We know you do. Its pretty much expected. It doesn’t help that the film moves at such a rapid pace. It would have been nice if the filmmakers would have let their characters catch their breath a little bit before they threw another obstacle in their faces. As it stands, it’s hard to warm up to anyone in A Home of Our Own since we don’t know the characters well enough to relate or feel the impact of anything that happens to them.
That being said, there are a couple of elements which do manage to work on some level. There’s an undeniable feistiness to the character Frances that’s intoxicating and hard not to embrace, which is helped by the fact that they occasionally throw her some good lines such as her thoughts on saying Thanksgiving prayer in which she says “one of these heathens” in reference to her children. Also, I do appreciate the significance of the house in the film as a symbol of family and roots. There is something to said for the sense of pride and achievement that comes with owning a house and a piece of land that your family can call their own and which signifies, among other things, both history and memories.
I can see why Bates was attracted to her role. Frances calls on many of the actress’s strengths, namely that of playing formidable and self-assured women. Furlong holds his own alongside Bates and does what he can with the character of Shayne, despite the fact that, like Bates, his role comes with its own clichéd limitations. Meanwhile, Oh as Mr. Munimura proves the film’s brightest light as a closed-off man who finds a second chance at family and love as a result of the Laceys’ presence in his life.
The lone instance where A Home of Our Own succeeds is in the Christmas sequence in which Frances, who makes a plan that all the gifts under the tree should be tools to be used for continuing work on the house, has not bought gifts for any of her children, which leads to a decidedly depressing holiday. In this moment, Frances is forced to re-assess her choice and remind herself that in the midst of her never ending determination, she needs to let her children have an actual childhood. It’s the only time when A Home of Our Own stops throwing emotions at the audience and manages to actually say something real.
A Home of Our Own is now available on Blu-Ray from Olive Films.
Get it at Amazon:
A Home Of Our Own [Blu-ray] | [DVD] | [Instant]
