Director: Chris Columbus
Cast: Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, Catherine O’Hara
Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. I’m six years old in 1990, it would have been a marvel of avoidance—or a set of parents far more concerned about cartoonish violence than the ones I had—to somehow get to my 40s without having seen it probably half a dozen times.
Did I Like It: I’d be remiss to start this review without a word about Catherine O’Hara. That’d be the big reason why the review gets written now, as she passed away on Friday. Shee could play the imminently believable Kate McCallister here and seamlessly switch gears in the span of just a few years between the hateful/delightful Delia Deetz in Beetlejuice (1988), Sally the Ragdoll in The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and spend most of the rest of the next decade regularly being the best thing in a series of Christopher Guest movies where there were plenty of candidates for the MVP. I don’t say this lightly, but: She shared and was ultimately the heir to Madeline Kahn’s reign as the livewire in whatever movie she appeared. Now that they are both gone, I can’t think of talent that reaches anywhere close.
Yeah. Pretty safe bet that a review of A Mighty Wind is coming pretty quick.
But let’s try and make this review about something this movie offers that doesn’t get talked about all that much. There’ve been a dozen times when I seriously gave consideration to adding a field in the early matter detailing the credited screenwriter. One can make all the arguments about the auteur theory they can, and there are plenty of films where those arguments are unassailable, but I think the real reason I didn’t include the field is the prospect of going back to all of the previously written reviews and having to add that info. This film does feel of a piece with other Chris Columbus films, but that may be in no small part because this film was such a success that studios continued to hire him with the hope that he would bring some of Home Alone to those subsequent films. But we really need to talk about John Hughes’ work here. From all angles, this is obviously a family comedy, but it has the seemingly breezy, complicated plotting of the best thrillers. One can see the raw material for Kevin’s (Culkin, with enough charisma to spare that one never questions why they built a movie around him) war on crime all around the house, but the moments that drift in during act one that make the conceit work are unfurled so as not to make the viewer aware that they are seeing a plot unfold, but that Christmas is chaotic and anything can happen. Definitely, Hughes’ screenwriting work is not given enough credit here.