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Dusty: Guys, I’m eating junk and watching Home Alone! You better come out and stop me!
Rating: PG
Director: Chris Columbus
Writers: John Hughes
Stars: Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern
Release Date: November 16, 1990
Run time: 1 hour, 43 minutes
THE PLOT:
via wiki:
The McCallister family is preparing to spend Christmas in Paris, gathering at Kate and Peter’s home in a Chicago suburb on the night before their departure. Kate and Peter’s youngest son, Kevin, is frequently ridiculed by his cousins and siblings, particularly his older brother Buzz. Kevin inadvertently ruins the family dinner after a brief scuffle with Buzz, in which Kevin’s airplane ticket is accidentally thrown away, resulting in Kate sending him up to the attic. Kevin berates his mother for allowing the rest of the family to pick on him and wishes that his family would disappear. During the night, heavy winds cause a power outage, disabling the alarm clocks and causing the family to oversleep. In the confusion and rush to get to the airport, Kevin is accidentally left behind.
Kevin wakes to find the house empty and the family’s cars still in the garage, unaware that they had rented vans to take them to the airport. Thinking that his wish has come true, he is overjoyed with his newfound freedom. Later, Kevin becomes frightened by his next-door neighbor, “Old Man” Marley, who is rumored to be a serial killer who murdered his family. The McCallister home is soon targeted by the “Wet Bandits”, Harry Lyme and Marv Murchins, a pair of burglars who have been breaking into other vacant houses in the neighborhood. Kevin tricks them into thinking that his family is still home, forcing them to postpone their plans to rob the McCallister home.
Kate realizes mid-flight that Kevin was left behind, and upon arrival in Paris, the family discovers that all flights for the next two days are booked, and that the phone lines are still down back home in Chicago. Peter and the rest of the family stay in his brother’s apartment in Paris, while Kate, fearing for Kevin’s safety, manages to get a flight back to Scranton, Pennsylvania. She tries to find a flight to Chicago, but all the flights are booked. Kate is overheard by Gus Polinski, the lead member of a traveling polka band, who offers to let her travel with them to Chicago in a moving van.
Meanwhile, on Christmas Eve, Harry and Marv finally realize that only Kevin is in the McCallister home, and Kevin overhears them discussing plans to break into the house that night. Kevin starts to miss his family and asks the local Santa Claus impersonator if he could bring his family back for Christmas. He goes to church and watches a choir perform, eventually re-encountering Marley, who disproves the rumors about him. Marley points out his granddaughter in the choir and mentions he otherwise would not get to see her since she is the daughter of his estranged son. Kevin suggests to Marley that he should reconcile with his son.
Kevin returns home and rigs the house with booby traps. Harry and Marv break in, spring the traps, and suffer various injuries. While Harry and Marv pursue Kevin around the house, he calls the police and lures the duo into a vacant neighboring house that they had previously broken into. Harry and Marv ambush Kevin and prepare to get their revenge, but Marley intervenes and knocks them out with a snow shovel. The police arrive and arrest Harry and Marv, having identified all the houses that they broke into due to Marv’s habit of flooding them.
On Christmas Day, Kevin is initially disappointed to find that his family is still gone, but Kate arrives home, and they reconcile. The rest of the family then returns after waiting in Paris until they could obtain a direct flight to Chicago. Kevin keeps silent about his encounter with Harry and Marv, although Peter finds Harry’s knocked-out gold tooth. Kevin then watches Marley reuniting with his son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter before being yelled at by Buzz for destroying his room.
MY REVIEW
I was not sure that this movie would hold up after three decades. I remembered that the violence is over-the-top and my perspective is a lot different as an adult parent than it was as a child. The magic ingredient within this Christmas classic – a thing I did not recognize or compute when I was young – is its heart. Kevin went through a very real “hero’s journey” plot arc in this film, so that by the time we got to his home defense insanity at the end, there was palpable joy for the character and the audience in his newfound maturity, made manifest with each and every injury he inflicted on his hapless adult opponents.
When we meet Kevin, he is the most troubled member of a collectively antagonistic family. I mean, if you watch the first 20 minutes of the movie, the unifying character trait of the entire McAllister group is that they are unkind to each other. In a fit of anger, after being unfairly singled out by his entire family, including most hurtfully by his mother, Kevin makes a fateful wish to her face that she and the rest of them would disappear.
Once he gets his wish the following morning, he begins the hero’s journey. Initially he celebrates. Not long after, though, he begins to need things, and it does not go well. He gets scared in a store, so much so that he flees and shoplifts a toothbrush, narrowly escaping the police. With the weight of that escape, he more soberly adopts the adult responsibility of self-provision (shopping, laundry, decorating the house for Christmas, personal hygiene, etc.) He is also forced to tackle the adult responsibility of facing down two would-be robbers. The struggle with providing for himself gives him a greater appreciation for the family he wished away along with a longing to see them again. As to the robbers, he is understandably scared.
At this point, Kevin begins to regret his wish in earnest. Bereft of help and protection, while wearing the weight of duty to his home, he goes on a knowledge quest. First, eh visits a Santa Claus impersonator, makes his last childhood wish, and leaves disappointed. Then he goes to Church to seek help from God. His journey has taken him from boy, to young adult, to an adult seeking wisdom, and now to an adult learning wisdom. He meets his neighbor Marley for the first time on a church pew. He learns that his family’s beliefs regarding his next door neighbor are wrong. This moment marks the part of the story arc wherein Kevin moves past the wisdom of manhood into the wisdom of fatherhood. He’s now not just a member of his family, but its leader, capable of interacting with other leaders on an equal footing. “Old Man Marley” is not a serial killer. He is in fact a good man suffering from the pain of a broken relationship with his son. Marley gives Kevin sound advice about being good and Kevin takes it to heart, returning the favor by giving council and encouragement to him regarding his son and granddaughter. This is the moment wherein Kevin’s growth arc is complete.
If you aren’t paying close attention, you miss this change, but when Kevin returns home that night, knowing that the Wet Bandits are imminently arriving, he has completed his maturity arc. He faces them not just as a man, but as more of a man than either of them are. He is calm and confident, he prays over his meal before his tormenters arrive, and with the eventual help of Marley – a community member with whom he is a spiritual equal – he soundly defeats his adversaries. There was never a doubt that he he would, so the fight is a joyous thing to behold for both the character and the audience.
The mean, angry, erratic, lashing-out Kevin from the start of the film is not the kid who beats the Wet Bandits. Instead, the new Kevin does. Every accurately lobbed paint can, every nail in the foot, every well-aimed blast from his BB gun, and every horrifying large spider to the face, serves as evidence of Kevin’s change and his maturity. He’s joyful. He’s embraced his burdens, felt the comfort of God’s provision in meeting his needs, and is thankful for both the burdens and the provision. That’s why we can laugh at all of the violence as an audience. A scared or mean kid doling out injuries isn’t funny. That’s either sad or disturbing. A reborn man, though, fighting a righteous battle against an overmatched evil? He can make us laugh as he outwits and out-fights two adults never made the journey he’s made, and who should have recognized sooner that they were in over their heads. Kevin needed to be firmly on the side of good for the audience to take pleasure in his victory over evil. The movie prior to fight night is when that growth happens – but the key point is his visit to the church. When Kevin’s plans finally hit a snag, he was saved by love. Marley had been keeping an eye out for him and then came to his rescue. The original Kevin, even in a large family, lacked love or a defender. Thus, the rescue was yet another proof of Kevin’s transformation. A boy can be helpless but a man can find an ally.
The movie ends as Kevin sees through the window that his new friend is reuniting with his estranged son and granddaughter, just moments after he reunited with his own mother and the rest of his family who had failed him. Kevin’s reunion with his family is imperfect, though. There’s a distance between them that is not bridged before the film ends. Their looks express confusion and a lack of intimacy. Kevin’s father in particular is baffled by the fact his son went shopping and reacts to him almost as if he is a stranger. There is happiness in being together again, but there remains a sense that Kevin is different than the other McAllisters. He might be the only adult among them. The arc of the movie is that his differences which once were used to single him out negatively spurred growth and became evidence of his goodness. The new Kevin might bridge the gap of love with his family in a way that the old Kevin was incapable and ill-equipped. The story ends with this hope.
Home Alone is a PG movie, but I think it probably should exist in a category between PG and PG-13. There is probably more bad language and violence than is appropriate for a small kid. I would imagine that this sort of thing likely varies with each kid, but I thought the most difficult injury to watch was Marv stepping onto a nail on the stairs. A lot of the other violence was cartoonish and silly, but seeing someone step onto a nail made me squirm quite a bit.
The performances in this movie are amazing. Macaulay Culkin was unbelievably charismatic at such a young age, from beginning to end, and he effortlessly sold me on all his range of emotions. The actors who really make the movie work though are Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern because their job was the most difficult. They had to provide a performance that walked the careful line of delivering menace, but not fear. The movie does not work if they aren’t a real threat. It also doesn’t work if they are genuinely scary. They both manage this balance by coming across as angry, but while giving no hint of any actual desire to hurt anyone. They’re the sort of criminals that probably have kids in their family who they love. By the time we reach the big confrontation, Kevin’s house feels like it’s in danger, but Kevin never really does. The young audience who watches this movie needs to feel like Kevin is safe in order to enjoy what he is doing, and I think they do.
Daniel Stern delivers the biggest laugh of the entire movie. His scream of abject terror, when Kevin put the tarantula on his face, had me rolling.
The musical score is another area of excellence for this movie, which stands to reason with John Williams as the composer. The movie contains a few traditional Christmas songs, but most of the actual score is original to Williams and he created a sound that still seems to embody the holiday for many people. The man is a genius.
Overall, I’m very happy to have revisited this movie as an adult. It’s truly a holiday genre classic.
Have you seen Home Alone? What did you think?