There are said to be parents who covered their children’s eyes in the cinema as the evil criminal duo fell for the tenth time into one of the many painful traps that Kevin had cleverly set up in defense of his home. Marbles, Christmas tree balls, toy soldiers and irons as weapons of war.
But then they also had to laugh at the tangible slapstick that is now an integral part of Christmas on television or streams year after year.
“Home Alone,” directed by Chris Columbus from a script by the great comedy specialist John Hughes (“Ferris Makes Blue”), is a phenomenon. Even if it doesn’t look like it today, it was anything but foreseeable at the time it was created. Hughes wrote down the script for “Family Comedy Without The Family” in just one weekend while in a champagne mood, but it was massively changed again during filming.
Kevin’s Uncle Frank was initially the initiator behind the planned robbery in the McCallisters’ house. Uncle Frank, who wants to tell the parents of the abandoned boy on the plane on the way to Paris that this isn’t all that bad, after all, he had forgotten his reading glasses!
Fortunately, this idea didn’t stick, otherwise the stupidest criminal duo in film history would probably have ended up as a nonentity.
“Home Alone” brings the whole family together
Although it’s usually the casting of the child role that causes the most problems for producers, in this case it was the other way around: Hughes had written the role specifically for Culkin. The list of actors who were intended for father Peter McCallister (and then all canceled) reads like a who’s who of Hollywood: Michael Douglas, Kevin Costner, Martin Sheen, Dan Aykroyd, John Travolta, Bill Murray, James Belushi, Chevy Chase, Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, Sean Penn, Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone, Christopher Lloyd and Jack Nicholson.
The essentially unknown and now deceased John Heard, who was ultimately taken (and was probably not afraid of being played against the wall by a child), does a fabulous job of portraying the mischievous, calm head of the family.
This is also sorely necessary, because Kate O’ Hara, as Kevin’s mother, struggles with a guilty conscience and panic attacks after the intense experience of loss, of course to the point of being a caricature. “Home Alone”, as the film is called in the US original, is both sober and apt, but above all it is a mother-son film. A love story between a steadfast mother and her brave boy. But also the initiation story of a mother’s boy who has to learn early on to venture out of his comfort zone.
Director Chris Columbus, who had already practiced with the script for “Gremlins” how to remove all contemplation from Christmas with gentle horror elements for a few hours, is really serious about his subject: after the (un)loved family is out in the house – and in Paris, of course, in the rain – Kevin not only lives out his anarchic tendencies uninhibited (“I eat sweets and watch nonsense on TV. Better come out and ban it to me!”), but also has to go to war against two burglars who are targeting his home and robbing the entire vacationing neighborhood.
The “wet bandits,” played in an adorably brainless manner by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, may at times resemble, in their cartoonish desperation, a doubled coyote from which the roadrunner Kevin evades one after the other. But the fact is that they want to pull the wool over the ears of a child who is actually completely defenseless.
Youth advocates must have thrown their hands up: “Home Alone” is a real terror and squatting thriller, especially in the second third and up to its blissful denouement at the end, which is more like “Assault by Night” by John Carpenter rather than referring to the common role models in the Christmas film genre.
Violence that doesn’t hurt
Of course, this is also an American and testosterone-driven obsession to defend one’s own life and that of one’s loved ones with armed force if necessary, especially as all other authorities disappear or prove to be moronic. But while directors like Sam Peckinpah reliably get their heads washed by critics and censors for their morally difficult reflections on this nightmare (“Straw Dogs”), Kevin remains for the audience, no matter what he does, the innocent lamb who cannot be blamed for anything .
However, the script also hits so many ingenious and absurdly funny hooks that this subversive pill is swallowed blindly by even the most nervous viewers. Hughes had already learned from Frank Capra (“Isn’t Life Beautiful?”) that the Christmas film provides a shiny surface for modern fairy tale motifs – the two wolves and the little kid – but, above all, can also serve as a socially critical projection surface.
Only very few viewers followed the widespread allusions to the highly dysfunctional family structures, inept authorities and police officers, the absent and self-absorbed suburban neighborhood and the stale consumerism under the Christmas tree. Apart from the fact that they certainly weren’t thinking about Edvard Munch’s “scream” when they saw the little guy screaming in the bathroom for a mock shave with inflationary use of after-shave.
“But do they have nude beaches?”
“Please bless this nutritious microwave macaroni and cheese and those who sold it to me so cheaply. Amen,” says the eloquent child hero in one scene, and it remains unclear whether the sharp parody of such aberrations in taste is just a pose or whether it is cleverly concealing product placement. In 1990, the advertising market was different and The Simpsons, which often reached a similar level of humor, had only been on the air for a few months.
But it’s not just such spite that runs through the film, which is soft as cotton and made festive with classic Christmas songs, but also dialogues that are almost absurdly funny. Just an example, possibly the best:
Rod: “Then who will feed the spider when we’re gone?”
Buzz: “She just had a load of mouse innards, enough for two weeks. Is it true that French girls don’t shave their legs?”
Rod: “Not a couple.”
Buzz: “But do they have nude beaches?”
Rod: “Not in winter.
When “Home Alone” came to the cinema, it meant a family film: a film for the whole family. This year the genre seems more like an excuse for an entire generation to use going to the cinema with their own group of children as an excuse to happily recall their own childhood.
In addition to all these jokes and the comic violence staged with the right timing (“Angels With Filty Souls”!), which takes the edge off the horror scenario in the last 30 minutes and remains a spectacle even after the hundredth repetition, there are still many heart-touching scenes in memory, which then – of course! – correspond to the well-known Christian values, which are at least polished to a shine at Christmas time.
After escaping from the bandits, Kevin visits a church (hiding, as the amused onlookers can expect, in Jesus’ miniature stable), where he promptly meets a neighbor from whom he hides because of his nasty and unkempt appearance – and especially because of the stories of his fat brother Buzz – has been feeling fear for a long time.
Of course, the old man turns out to be a ghost who has been left alone by everyone, and who not only gives the boy a suitable moral sermon, but also offers himself as a helping angel. And of course at the end he prevents Kevin – who was hung on a (coat) hook by the bandits like one of the helpless victims in the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” – from being inflicted with worse suffering. This lost soul, who beautifully materializes the delicate, melancholic tone of the film, is then granted a happy ending.
After riding through all the film factory emotions in just 90 minutes, France was exposed to ridicule and the American way of life was patriotically but not without an ironic undertone reestablished, the mother is finally allowed to shine once again as a saintly figure (and her to take my son in his arms just minutes before the family, who had calmly followed him).
What other choice was there for a sequel than to potentiate all the ingredients of the first part to the point of ridiculousness and complete implausibility, drown the rest in kitsch and allow the gifted Tim Curry a few minutes of well-intentioned slapstick…
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