Movie Review – Home Alone
Principal Cast : Macauley Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, John Heard, Catherine O’Hara, Roberts Blossom, Angela Goethals, Devin Ratray, Gerry Bamman, Hillary Wolf, John Candy, Larry Hankin, Michael C Maronna, Kristin Minter, Daiana Campeanu, Kieran Culkin, Ralph Foody, Michael Guido, Hope Davis.
Synopsis: An eight-year-old troublemaker, mistakenly left home alone, must defend his home against a pair of burglars on Christmas Eve.
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Written by John Hughes and directed by Chris Columbus, this Looney Toons-adjacent Christmas favourite remains an iconic piece of 90’s cinema thanks to the precocious lead turn from Macauley Culkin and frenzied bad guys Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. From it’s terrifically simple premise to its whack-a-doodle violence and cartoonish antics of the Pesci/Stern double-act, this perennially charming seasonal blockbuster stands as a masterful work of silliness, charm and big-screen hokum, even despite some of the plot contrivance threatening to overturn the suspension of disbelief. While it may be slightly sadistic with its treatment of the Bad Guys, and innumerable articles in subsequent decades have indicated that the violence perpetrated here would result in a number of deaths, the gleeful slap-happy injuries and various pratfalls make for crowd-pleasing fantasy viewing, as Culkin takes it up to Pesci and Stern with increasingly physical results.
Only days before Christmas, Kevin McCallister (Culkin) is about to travel to France with his family, including father Peter (John Heard), mother Kate (Catherine O’Hara) and bullyboy older brother, Buzz (Devin Ratray), when through hugely contrived convenience he is accidentally left at home, alone. After waking up and discovering his predicament, the precocious Kevin sets about living it up as king of the hill. Meanwhile, his family all arrive in Paris to discover he’s missing, but are unable to book a flight back home over the extremely busy holiday period. Back in Chicago, a par of clumsy, halfwit criminals, going by the name of “The Wet Bandits”, Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern), have a plan to raid the houses in Kevin’s neighbourhood while everyone is away, only to run afoul of the clever young lad; when Harry and Marv attempt to rob the McCallister residence, Kevin sets a number of booby traps to cause maximum carnage to their inept bumbling, resulting in an increasingly over-the-top game of can and mouse between the trio.
Born from the mind of 80’s cinematic impresario John Hughes (The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Uncle Buck), Chris Columbus’ Home Alone has all the hallmarks of the legendary screenwriter’s magical touch; intransigent family dramas (Kevin’s parents are distant to his needs, and he is treated appallingly by his entire family), slick 80’s humour (Culkin’s Ferris Bueller-esque fourth-wall-breaking asides are pitched perfectly) and plenty of off the wall physical comedy (perhaps more than any other film of the era, I’d say). There’s a real charm to the film, loaded with heartfelt Christmas warmth amongst the catastrophic bodily injury sustained by Pesci and Stern’s hilariously idiotic larcenists. The tingly sensation of Kevin’s dissatisfaction with his family gives rise to his sense of youthful freedom once he discovers he’s been left home alone, and while the Catherine O’Hara subplot in his mother trying to find her way back home to rescue him punctuates the main storyline with respite from the falls, crashes and flamethrowing, the audience has come to see a pair of Wile E Coyote-types absolutely get smashed by Culkin’s erstwhile Roadrunner archetype.
In true Hollywood style, Kevin is always one or two steps ahead of the bad guys, and Culkin’s screen persona – while a touch wooden in the early going – channels early Shirley Temple insouciance as he lays his various traps and machinations. Chris Columbus, who until this point had helmed the popular 80’s comedy Adventures In Babysitting, and the taciturn Heartbreak Hotel, delivers an impressively chaotic movie with style to spare, from the suburban snowbound antics of a police chase across an ice-rink to the McCallister home becoming a labyrinth of paint tins, nails and flamethrowers for Harry and Marv to navigate, and while the film skirts with becoming a bit too much of a silly cartoon at times (the moment a real-life tarantula makes its way onto Daniel Sterns face is a moment of abject catharsis for the movie’s tone), Columbus neatly threads genuine heart into the film with a sweet subplot involving Roberts Blossom’s “old man across the street” character, believed by most of the film’s characters to be some kind of serial killer or neighbourhood menace. The balance between outrageous violence and tinsel-and-frosting sweetness is handled with grace here, anchored by John Williams’ “feels like it’s always been there” Christmas-themed orchestral score. Notably, Columbus would work with Williams again; for Home Alone 2 and then for the Harry Potter franchise nearly a decade later.
As much as Macauley Culkin’s personality could become a little irksome after while, the film’s success as a modern-day mega-hit sits comfortably on the casting of Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. Pesci, better known as a foul-mouthed big-screen hard man (thanks to numerous turns in films like Raging Bull and Goodfellas) had had a breakout comedic turn in 1989’s Lethal Weapon 2, playing stammering, stuttering attorney Leo Getz, and Columbus felt that he would be a perfect foil for Kevin as the “brains” of the Wet Bandit outfit, in Harry. Pesci plays it perfectly against type, his snarling, sneering acting style a genuinely threatening aesthetic opposite Culkin’s clean-cut all-American kid archetype, and among the funnier aspects is Pesci having to not swear at all during the movie – instead, the actor generates a gritted-teeth mumble of under the breath cursing that will make younger kids laugh out loud. He endures all manner of physical violence as well, with numerous falls, flips, penetrative and blunt-force trauma inflicted upon his person in the name of Hollywood entertainment. To his credit, Daniel Stern also gives the role of Marv his all – Marv is an absolute imbecile and arguably the “muscle” of the double-team, although it’s he who seems to cop the most physical abuse throughout, from a number of paint tins, burns, nails and gravity-defying plummets to the ground to the point he should have been in hospital (or dead). Stern is a riot, screaming, screeching and wailing as Marv endures all manner of injury with a plasticine face of agony etched all over him, and he sells the pain incredibly well. I would suggest that were Pesci and Stern not up for the comedic aspects of the film as much as they are, Home Alone would be a far lesser movie.
It’s easy now to forget just how much a juggernaut Home Alone was back in its initial cinema release. From a sub-$20m budget, the film would gross nearly a half-billion dollars globally by the time it all ended, spawning a sequel two years later and turning Culkin into a child actor who lost his way to drugs and partying for a long, long time. A pop-culture behemoth, the film has barely dated itself thanks to eternal themes of family, fantasy and seasonal hearts growing two sizes that day, and although some of the often imitated playground moments (like Kevin slapping is face with aftershave and screaming) might have lost their pop today, the easily accessible violence and Culkin’s wink-wink performance make for a captivating holiday favourite. Home Alone deserves its reputation as an annual classic, having lost none of its fun and sentimentality even in today’s cynical world. A true gem, in every sense.
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