Adulthood comes with many terrible realizations. You realize that one day you and everyone you know will be dead, that Santa Claus isn’t real, that nice things cost a lot of money, and that every woman on earth is morbidly obsessed with making a damn fool out of you. But an important one for a burgeoning film critic comes with watching beloved films from your childhood and realizing they aren’t quite as great as they seemed at the time.
Thus begins my bittersweet review of "Home Alone", a film I first saw at age 6 on a military base in Spain. I couldn’t have been more amused, and my VHS copy would see dozens of replays over the years. The ridiculous story essentially embodies two fantasies of harried children and childish adults everywhere.
The first fantasy: 8 year old Kevin (Macaulay Culkin, launching his super-stardom and eventual arrest for lobster theft) finds himself left in charge of a upper-middle class Chicago home after his large nuclear family mistakenly takes a Christmas trip to Paris without him. Kevin indulges in giant ice-cream sundaes, watches sleazy noir films, rides the sleigh down the stairs, checks out a Playboy ("No clothes on anybody. Sickening!"), shoots baseball figures with a BB gun, and terrorizes the pizza boy. With the obvious exception of the last example, the simple pleasures of solitude he partakes actually illustrate great restraint on the filmmaker’s part, as most kids in Children Without Adult Supervision films are written to run around screaming and vandalizing everything in sight.
The second fantasy: When holiday burglars Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern) attempt to loot Kevin’s stronghold, he sets an elaborate series of traps to thwart their movements. Although earlier on Kevin expresses an inability to pack his own suitcase and has a severe case of gerontophobia, he appears to be a child prodigy when it comes to brutalizing wrongdoers. We can only hope that in the world of the film, Kevin has grown up to be an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay.
Rewatching the film through the lens of both an adult (in theory) and film critic (by self-granted title), it becomes exponentially more difficult to revel in the atmosphere as the plot progresses. Can Kevin’s family really not find one person in all of Chicago to check on their son? Why does the family reunite at the close and then have virtually nothing to say? Does the social services department in Illinois take a month long Christmas vacation? I remember wondering about a few of these points as a child, so perhaps the greatest compliment I can issue it as a family film is that it abuses plausibility to kids and adults alike.
Another grown-up realization; the deadly lattice of traps Kevin sets for the burglars are truly sadistic. If Kevin had simply obtained his father’s pistol and shot them both in the head, he would be in the right, brazenly ignoring that he neglected to call the police. After he burns the family name into Harry’s hand and drops an iron onto Marv’s head, I perversely root for the criminals to disembowel this little bastard before he tortures someone else. If Pesci and Stern didn’t do such a good job of playing the battered crooks, I might not have been able to laugh at their suffering.
But I did. Maybe in a few years I won’t, but I apparently still have enough kid in me that I can extract serious joy out of the misery of others. Though my hopes of being completely enthralled by what I had hoped was a timeless family classic flickered away, the film’s fantastical appeal remained largely intact. Largely.
3.5 out of 5
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