Home Again Parent Guide

A middle-aged fantasy for women, Home Again offers separated-but-not-divorced Alice Kinney (Reese Witherspoon) the “problem” of dealing with a bevy of men. An evening out with the girls to celebrate her 40th birthday (a non-event that has kept her in tears all day) leads to an all-nighter of binge drinking with three twenty-something guys that are homeless, wannabe filmmakers. The entourage crashes at her Hollywood home and the birthday girl almost has sex with one of them. Predictably, the gang is discovered the next morning when Grandma Lillian (Candice Bergen) drops by with Alice’s two young daughters.

After the surprise “Hello”, including the inevitable moment of trying to keep Harry (Pico Alexander) hidden behind the bedroom door, Grandma takes a liking to the boys and begins cooking up breakfast while Alice drives the girls to school and puts a few hours into her budding home décor business. By the time she returns, Lillian and the fellows have downed a few more glasses of wine and she has invited them to live in Alice’s pool house. Initially the mother-of-two isn’t so sure this is a good idea, until she peers through the window and views a greeting card moment of Harry, Teddy (Nat Wolff) and George (Jon Rudnitsky) having a family moment with her two youngsters, Rosie (Eden Grace Redfield) and Isabel (Lola Flanery).

At this point someone should yell, “CUT!”, and take some time to think about this little La La Land fairytale. Inviting three destitute strangers into your home so they can cavort with your little girls and regularly imbibe with Grandma just doesn’t seem to be a good game plan—even if they are willing to fix stuff around the house and show off their abs. For that matter, nothing in Alice’s life is rooted in reality. Living in her philandering and now deceased filmmaker father’s rambling home, she dabbles with her business but really spends the bulk of her time engaging in the soap opera of her empty life. She also succumbs to Harry’s frequent sexual overtures (this is depicted in many scenes of passionate kissing that eventually lead to the bedroom).

We can only assume an inheritance or Alice’s husband Austen (Michael Sheen), who is distracted with his music business in New York, is paying the bills for the ongoing party. But when he discovers the three amigos cavorting with his wife and daughters, he has a moment of sensibility and comes to Los Angeles. Yet his renewed presence only adds to the ongoing alpha male competition and does nothing to suggest Rosie and Isabel are going to have any hope of a stable family outcome.

Shot in a beautiful neighborhood with a cast of vanilla characters who look way too good to be stressed about jobs, money and life, Home Again is the antitheses of those many male-dominated movies with lusty women romping by the pool. If you can buy into the script’s subtle argument that if her father could roam the Hollywood hills looking for young women to bed, there’s no reason his daughter can’t do likewise, this romantic comedy may offer enough laughs to keep you interested.

About author

Rod Gustafson

Rod Gustafson has worked in various media industries since 1977. He founded Parent Previews in 1993, and today continues to write and broadcast the reviews in newspapers, on radio and (of course) on the Internet. His efforts also include writing and researching media in all its forms and observing how it effects society and culture. He and his wife Donna have four children.