Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, we’re revisiting the 1995 seasonal favorite, Home For The Holidays, directed by Jodie Foster.Happy Thanksgiving weekend! We might all still be passed out on the couch recovering from various food comas or scrolling online for the best Black Friday deals, but at the end of the day what this holiday is about is being with family. Chosen or biological.
Willingly or for tradition’s sake. For better and certainly for worse.
For years, entertainment has understood that Thanksgiving is one of the most narratively rich days of the year; where people come back to places they fought tooth and nail to get out of, coexist with those they try to avoid the rest of the year, and when tensions and long-covered secrets are always threatening to erupt.Subscribe to our newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.This week, we’ll look back at perhaps one of the most quintessential Thanksgiving comedies, 1995’s Home For The Holidays, directed by Jodie Foster. Although misunderstood and received quite coldly upon its release, the film has become a bit of a cult classic in recent years because of the distinctive and biting way it captures the bittersweet idiosyncrasies of a dysfunctional family.
Plus, with three decades of hindsight, we can now see an added queer lens of not only the character played by Robert Downey Jr., but of Foster herself as a director.Home For The Holidays follows Claudia (Holly Hunter), an art restorer and single mother who finds herself at an emotional crossroads in her life. She has just been unexpectedly fired from her job at a museum, her daughter Kitt (Claire Danes) seems more her friend than her child, and she is traveling back to Baltimore to her childhood home for the holiday weekend while battling a nasty cold.
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Jodie Foster