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Welcome back to Worth the Watch. It’s the first Friday of November, which means I get to check another never-before-seen movie off my watchlist and nerd out on it with all of you—aka my favorite day of the month. Today we’re talking about a Thanksgiving hidden gem from 1995 called Home for the Holidays starring Holly Hunter and Robert Downey Jr.

Truthfully, I’m not well-versed in holiday movies. I’ve seen the classics like Elf, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and Home Alone, but there are countless others that I’ve never gotten around to watching. For a while, I viewed holiday flicks as either too predictable or too Hallmark-y for my liking. I wanted to watch movies with more substance, whatever that means. But as I’ve matured, my heart has grown three sizes and my taste in movies has evolved a lot too. I can now appreciate fun, feel-good movies that I used to roll my eyes at. That’s exactly what I expected from Home for the Holidays: a silly feel-good Thanksgiving movie about a quirky family. Boy, was I wrong.

Before we dive in, you know the drill: Help me decide which film we will cover next month!👇

Now, on to the review!🚨Warning: spoilers below!🚨

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I recently moved back into the childhood home that I grew up in to save money for my upcoming wedding. As I’ve quickly learned, being a roommate with your parents as a fully grown adult is less than ideal, so I deeply resonated with Claudia’s predicament at the heart of Home for the Holidays. Although, her 36 hours at home were far more overstimulating than my first three months back at home, so for that I’m grateful.

Early in the film, Claudia (Holly Hunter) says to her parents,

That’s honestly how I felt about the entire movie. Home for the Holidays is one of the most chaotic movies I’ve watched in recent memory. Sometimes, the chaos adds to the humor—like when the Thanksgiving turkey goes flying across the table and lands in her older sister Joanne’s lap, only for the stuffing to spill all over her head as they lift the turkey off her. But other times, it makes for such an anxiety-inducing experience that I caught myself clenching my jaw hard enough to make my TMJ flare up.

The movie pinballs between being outrageous, reflective, cringy, stressful, and melancholic so quickly that I wasn’t quite sure what to feel and when to feel it. That probably is the experience of living in a dysfunctional family, but as a result, there were a lot of moments where I felt like I should’ve been laughing, but I wasn’t—either because I didn’t get the joke or because my sense of humor is from a different generation. The movie certainly is funny, which is why it has such a passionate cult following, but unfortunately a solid amount of the humor didn’t land with me. But thankfully, director Jodie Foster was wise enough to include the one type of universal joke that transcends generations and languages: the fart joke. There’s a hysterical fart scene with Aunt Glady that had me laughing hard.

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Holly Hunter is incredible as Claudia, and her performance is the glue that holds the movie together, making its surprisingly emotional moments land that much harder. But based on what I’ve read about this movie, most people agree that Robert Downey Jr.’s character, Tommy, steals every scene he’s in. He’s funny and loving, but you can sense the pain beneath his quick-witted, frantic persona, which hits differently when you realize that Downey Jr. was in the midst of his real-life struggles with drug addiction during the making of this movie.

Overall, I enjoyed Tommy, but I have one major gripe with the character: he’s a pervert. A running “joke”—if you can even call it that—throughout the film involves him attempting to snap Polaroids of family members in the most unflattering circumstances, including taking photos of his sister while she’s naked… Of all the reviews I’ve read, I haven’t seen a single person mention how bizarre that is. I’m generally willing to look past things in older movies that have aged poorly because they were products of a different time. But was there ever a time when this type of “joke” was considered normal? I found it incredibly off-putting.

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In a recent edition of Worth the Chat, Meredith wrote about how many of the best romantic comedies are built on “grand romantic gestures that would probably warrant a restraining order in real life.” There are a few of those borderline-creepy moments near the end of this film as well. After Claudia and Leo (Dylan McDermott) have somehow fallen in love within 12 hours of meeting, he plants a kiss on her that feels forced and unwanted. But we're supposed to find it romantic because the movie implies that Claudia is falling for him.

Then, at the very end of the movie, after Claudia and Leo have gone their separate ways, he surprises her on her flight home to Chicago, having bought a last-minute ticket just to sit beside her. He hopes they can spend the flight talking and figuring out whether their feelings for each other are real. And if they're not, he'll simply catch the next flight home. Call me a cynic, but I think I'd prefer a phone call.

Despite my critiques, I still enjoyed the movie. I appreciate that it feels completely different from what I expect out of a holiday movie. It still has all the classic tropes, but it captures an unhinged family holiday gathering in a raw, fresh way that I haven’t seen before. It reminded me of The Family Stone, but a little more random, and a lot more toxic.

With that, I'll leave you with a few other perspectives on this wonderfully weird holiday movie.

—@jaragon23 on Letterboxd

—@queer-giraffe on Pix

—@clairacurtis on Letterboxd

John Farrar went to film school, spent a few years as an editor, then accidentally built an audience online by sharing his passion for cinema. He covers film and TV for Pix Media, interviews the people behind some of your favorite shows and movies, and has never once successfully talked himself out of buying a movie ticket.