HOME MOVIE (Chris Smith, 2002) R

Reviewed: May 5, 2002

Home Movie is an awesome piece of work, ostensibly about five different homes: an all-electronic home in suburban Chicago, a missile silo home near Topeka, Kansas, a Louisiana bayou houseboat, a treehouse located in a remote Hawaiian rainforest and America's largest litter box. But really Home Movie's about the inhabitants of these homes and their fears, their solitude, their struggles, their hidden sadness. It's about what the home says about the inhabitant and what these inhabitants say about our world. Home Movie's remarkably seductive and controlling; once director Chris Smith's in your head, he plants roots.

This is a sad, lonely film. There's never more than two people in a frame. Besides the five houses' owners, there's only four or five other people who speak in the movie. Slowly the sparseness dawns on you, perfectly mirroring the isolation the home owners have imposed on themselves with their dwellings. The missile silo house owner talks about how he spends days underground, never rising above, only keeping in touch through the outside world through a handful of surveillance cameras and video monitors.

The sadness and pain are often masked with humor. You can laugh at how eccentric these people are, but I rarely did. They touched me instead. Their need for protection. What they're running away from. The treehouse owner and the electronic house owner both have dead children. The cat house couple talks about how cats are better than children cause they won't join gangs and recounts the time they rejected their niece's request to live with them while she attended college and haven't heard from her since. The bayou houseboat owner speaks about how he'll live to be 150 out in his paradise no one knows about, away from all the drunks and the car crashes and the criminals. The missile silo couple talks about how their house can withstand a one megaton blast, even if it occurred a mile away (I imagine a USA ravaged by nuclear holocaust and this couple hardly even noticing what's missing). All these people wanted to escape something, each of them have rejected the common way of life and their home is their solution.

Kubrick once said that he has "a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists... neither takes life as it is. Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are." And there is indeed hints of tragedy, of past wounds, in all these characters' lives. What made them reject the outside world? The houseboat guy got into a terrible fireworks accident, was recovering for a week in the houseboat and then simply never left. Everyone seems to have self-sustaining jobs, working from home, never having to leave. They don't wanna. Their home is their private kingdom and they are the Emperors (the electronic house owner has literally achieved supreme control since he can move entire rooms of his house with the touch of a button). Why give up your power?

(I'll interrupt my philosophic waxing for a second and say point blank one of the things I loved most about this movie is every single house is so fucking kick-ass [with the exception of the cat house; though I'm sure it's heaven to many, it didn't quite appeal to me]. I was dying to live in four of the houses less than twenty minutes into the movie. Okay, back to your regularly scheduled programming.)

Preservation is another theme that hauntingly whispers throughout Home Movie. The electronic house owner speaks about using his robot as an eventual medium between his corpse and the living world after he dies. There are stuffed dogs. There's a special lamp to honor a beloved dead cat. The Hawaiian treehouse honors a fallen son. The treehouse owner also talks a bit about improvements that could be made to the home, but then quickly says she won't bother cause ultimately everything is temporary.

What's most beautiful about Home Movie is how it captures the serenity and the inner peace these peculiar characters have achieved in spite of their hurt. It shows how, yes, they have each carved out a somewhat bizarre way of life that initially you might just chuckle and scoff at, but really you envy them; through it all their homes have brought them complacency. I want to live in a distant Hawaii rainforest, surrounded all day by purity and nature and stunning vistas, away from all our world's horrors, cut off, bothered by no one. After September 11th I'd love to live underground in a missile silo that could withstand a nuclear blast. I want to be safe. I want to be comforted. And for an hour, thanks to Chris Smith, I was.

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