Back during exam week, looking for something to just watch, I happened across "Home Alone" on one of the channels. I had never really seen it! Granted, it came out when I was first starting graduate school, I didn't really go to movies, and I wouldn't have wanted to see what looked like a kids' caper movie anyway.
But now, older and sadder, I decided to watch it. I liked the theme music - I had been teaching myself an arrangement of it on the piano - and I thought, "okay, I'll watch." Even though my impression of it was that it was all slapstick, and Kevin was a super-brat (and that his family's leaving him behind was a Freudian slip).
I was surprised. Yes, Kevin is a little bratty, but also, his siblings and cousins were mean to him - meaner than my brother and I were to each other, and we argued a lot. Like - apparently cheese pizza was the only one he liked, and NO ONE left even a slice for him at the beginning? That would have been unheard of in my family (granted, there was just me and my brother, not a whole uncontrollable crowd). And he wished his family would disappear....and then a chain of events that couldn't happen today (power outage, phone outage, alarm clocks get shut down) take place leading to the family nearly being late for the trip to Paris, and one of the siblings miscounts people, and Kevin winds up left in the attic where he was sleeping.
Yeah, there's the plot with the burglars and all the slapstick, but I admit I ignored some of that (and I was fixing my dinner that night during part of it) and wound up paying more attention to Kevin's coping with being along. He is a pretty resourceful kid - figures out how to deal with his fears (using the faked-up-for-the-movie "old" gangster movie dialog to make people think someone grown-up is home) and providing for himself (walking, I guess, to a small market for food, buying himself a toothbrush).
But also, there are melancholy moments - he winds up sleeping in his parents' bed, I'm sure that was intended as a comfort-seeking thing. And he orders "a lovely cheese pizza just for me" one night. And decorates the house for Christmas (presumable the family did not, as they were going to Paris).
All the while, his family is trying to get back to him (remember, the phones are out, so no one can call him to reassure him).
At one point he goes into a church, because he hears a choir, and, I guess, people are there? (I may be reading my own pandemic experience into this). He encounters the "scary" old man from his street - the one kids claim murdered his whole family. (Every neighborhood, I think, has that - the haunted house, or the person who is evil, or something like that, where it's 100% not true, but kids spread the story around. We had "The Vonderheide House" in my neighborhood; I don't even think the Vonderheides even still lived there when I was a kid, but we knew it as that, it was supposed to be haunted or had something scary in the basement, or whatever)
Anyway, the old man isn't a murderer, he's just an old man who had a falling-out with his son and the only way he can see his granddaughter is to visit her choir rehearsals at a time when her dad isn't around. And Kevin talks to him, and realizes he's not so bad, and tries to encourage him to reconcile. (Spoiler alert: he does, at the very end).
He also defeats the burglars who wind up being hauled off in a police car. I think that's the plot maybe kids pay attention to, but I admit to me it seemed less important than the stress the mom was having getting home (and there's a great small role for John Candy as a polka-band leader) and Kevin dealing with being on his own.
Though one of the other things that struck me was that very-particular 80s/90s setting, John Hughes movie - the upper-middle-class Winnetka or Lake Forest suburb with the big, fancy houses. I used to live in Illinois, and where I grew up in Ohio, there were some neighborhoods like that. And it struck me even more now - living in a lower-SES area and living in a small, old house where lots of stuff breaks and needs more maintenance than I can easily manage. And how nice it would be to just be....effortlessly well-off, where you don't have to juggle expenses but also don't have to juggle the LOGISTICS of things (I think this is a single-person thing. I could probably AFFORD some of the stuff I've been pushing off having done, but the effort of calling someone and getting estimates and deciding on a person and then maybe having to ride herd on them to get them to finish and deal with the disruption in my life. Sometimes I fantasize about maybe renting an apartment for a few months, and moving out a lot of the breakable/valuable stuff, and just having the workers have at it and rewire the place and redo some of the plumbing, and put a new roof on WHILE I AM NOT THERE but again - I'm not sure I could swing all of that. And yes, part of it is specifically a single-WOMAN thing, some workers are more likely to go AWOL if there's not a guy calling them up "reminding" them of their contract here).
But also the decorating style; that sort of late-80s-preppie style is very familiar to me and yet, it's not a style I've seen for years, because people here who have money decorate in a very different way.
One thing that struck me watching it now - the loneliness Kevin seems to feel at points, the isolation. How he tries to make Christmas for himself (leaving out a plate of cookies and carrots - I don't know if that was that he genuinely still believed, or if he was trying to MAKE himself believe in Santa). I don't know that I would have noticed that so much had I not spent last Christmas alone, decorating, ordering a few extra presents for myself, and fretting about the gifts I mailed that seemed to be lost in the mail (I sent them Priority Mail on Dec. 8, 2020, they arrived in Virginia around January 15, 2021).
But it ends happily, I guess - the family all comes back, they sort of reconcile....and yet, Kevin seems left alone again at the end.
It was, I will say, a different movie than I expected - more heart, some of the characters a bit more three-dimensional than I thought.
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