November 4, 1995
Web posted at: 12:45 a.m. EST
From Correspondent Sherri Sylvester
LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- It's not a Thanksgiving painted by Normal Rockwell, but rather a more distorted sketch of the holiday, directed by Jodie Foster (16K JPEG image).
"Home for the Holidays" is a portrait of grown-up children fighting, a crazy aunt drinking, and dad playing his organ until everyone wants to strangle him. Sound Familiar? The cast thought so. (323K QuickTime movie - courtesy Paramount Pictures)
Holly Hunter says that she can relate with this family. "I don't think that this family is odd. People may have greater or lesser elements of drama in their Thanksgiving Day. But I recognize these people." (128K AIFF sound or 128K WAV sound)
Charles Durning, who plays Dad, said it also rang true for him. "I had two older brothers, a younger brother, and sister in the middle, so we had our share of fistfights and arguing and needling and heckling."
And on the set, not only was the comedy physical around the dining table, the food was airborn. Foster didn't allow prop food. She wanted the reality of Turkey Day, so 64 birds, 44 pies, 35 pounds of stuffing, 30 pounds of sweet potatoes, 20 pounds of mashed potatoes and 18 bags of mini-marshmallows were hauled in to ensure that they never ran out festive fixin's. "It was like working on a cruise ship," Foster says.
And what was it like living in perpetual Thanksgiving dinner mode for 10 days? "It was stinky; it was smelly," Robert Downey Jr. says. He say he would come in at eight o'clock in the morning, smelling the food again and again, and they'd say, "all right be charming." Downey says that he was lucky because he didn't have to eat any of the food, just "hack it up and flick it across the table."
The actress who plays short-stop to the turkey projectile, Cynthia Stevenson, says she only had to get smacked with the bird twice, but that was quite enough. (179K QuickTime movie - courtesy Paramount Pictures)
"The first time we did it and it worked correctly, but there didn't seem to be as much turkey innards as there might have been, so we did it a second time and just loaded it up," Stevenson says.
It's a scene that brought back memories of holidays past for actor Steve Guttenberg. "My uncle had trouble carving the turkey. He complained about the sharpness of the knife. My grandma proceeded to rip the turkey apart with her own hands and throw a leg and breast on everyone's plate and said, 'There, that's Brooklyn style.'"
Dylan McDermott says the film sums up how he feels when he goes home. "It's like, no matter what I do, I always feel like I'm five years old, and I end up in the back of my father's car looking out the window, and nothing has changed in 25 years."
Foster says that the film, although richly funny, has a soul- searching theme. "I've gone through phases of just forgiving your parents for not being as young as they used to be or not being able to do the things they could do before, and I think this film is about forgiveness. It has a real fondness and a real bitterness as well towards family members," Foster says. (204K AIFF sound or 204K WAV sound)
With the film opening in theaters this weekend, most of the cast says that they will brave the trip and head home for the holidays as well.
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