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Home Alone (1990)
Lookback/Review by Markdc
One of my favorite childhood memories is going to a church Christmas party with my family when I was ten years old. It just so happened that a new movie theater had opened in our town (the old one was destroyed in a fire several years earlier), so the adults gave out movie passes to me and my siblings as well as the children from another family. Then all us kids piled into my parents’ station wagon, and my oldest brother drove us to the theater, and we saw a new family comedy that had recently come out called Home Alone. We loved the movie, and, apparently, so did everyone else.
In case you’re one of the handful of people in the Milky Way Galaxy who has never seen Home Alone or at least heard of it, the plot centers around Kevin McCallister, an eight-year-old boy who resides in a wealthy suburb of Chicago, Illinois. He experiences as miserable an existence as is possible for a rich, able-bodied, blond-haired White kid living in a resplendent mansion. Kevin, the youngest child in his family, doesn’t get to stay up late and watch violent movies and gets picked on by his older siblings—and his situation isn’t helped by the fact that he's a spoiled brat who can’t even tie his own shoelaces without assistance. On the night before his family is scheduled to fly to Paris, France to spend Christmas with relatives, Kevin gets into an altercation with Buzz, his oldest brother, at dinnertime. This results in a huge mess, and Kevin gets sent to bed by his mom. Feeling aggrieved, he makes a solemn wish for his entire family to disappear. As though in reply, a terrible storm reigns down upon his neighborhood and wrecks the power lines. With no electricity, the alarm clocks in the house shut off, and everyone oversleeps as a result. In their haste to get to the airport and make their flight to Paris, Kevin’s family accidentally leaves him behind. When he wakes up and discovers that he’s—wait for it—home alone, Kevin believes his wish has come true. Meanwhile, his parents realize their mistake during the flight to Paris, and once they reach their destination, Mrs. McCallister takes a plane back to the States in what proves to be the first leg of a lengthy and often frustrating journey to return home and reunite with her youngest child. At first, Kevin revels in his newfound liberation and does all the things he’s always wanted to do but wasn’t allowed, such as jumping on his parents’ bed, going into Buzz’s room, and staying up late and watching “bad” movies while eating all kinds of delicious junk. However, he gradually misses his family and regrets the wish he made. Worse yet, he discovers that someone is coming to his house—and it ain’t Santa Claus. Two burglars named Harry Lime and Marv Murchins, who go by the name “Wet Bandits,” have been robbing homes in Kevin’s neighborhood and makes his house a prime target due to its size and opulence. Over the next few days, Kevin comes up with various clever schemes to keep the crooks away. Meanwhile, he learns to become self-sufficient by doing things he’s never done before, such as showering, grocery shopping, and using the washer and dryer. Furthermore, Kevin learns how to overcome his fears. During the course of the movie, the thing that scares him the most is his next-door neighbor, “Old Man” Marley, because of rumors that have circulated among the neighborhood children that he’s a serial killer. Nicknamed the “South Bend Shovel Slayer,” Marley supposedly murders people with his—you guessed it—snow shovel. However, Kevin ends up meeting Marley while the two are watching the latter’s granddaughter (whom Marley has never met) perform in a church choir and discovers that the rumors about the old man are false. The two have a heart-to-heart, and Kevin urges Marley to reconcile with his son, with whom he had a falling-out years ago, so that he can be with his family on Christmas and see his grandchild. Harry and Marv eventually learn that Kevin is—wait for it—home alone and plan a break-in on Christmas Eve night. But Kevin overhears them discussing these plans and sets up elaborate booby traps around the house. The robbery is foiled when the unwitting crooks fall victim to these traps, and Kevin calls the police and taunts Harry and Marv into chasing him to a neighboring house that they had burglarized earlier. But the pair outsmart Kevin this time and catch him. They are about to exact revenge when Marley comes up from behind and knocks them out with his snow shovel. The police soon arrive and arrest the Wet Bandits, and on Christmas morning, Mrs. McCallister returns home, and she and Kevin reconcile before discovering, to their surprise and delight, that the rest of the family took a direct flight from Paris to Chicago and are back, too. Shortly afterward, Kevin looks out a window and witnesses another joyful reunion between Marley and his son and his family. All is well at the McCallister household—until the sequel.
Written and produced by John Hughes—the creator behind some of the most popular comedies of the 1980’s, including Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—and directed by Chris Columbus, Home Alone was released in the United States on November 16, 1990. Though it ran overbudget and ended up costing a then-hefty $18 million, the movie was a runaway smash hit and played in theaters for well over nine months. When it finally came to home video, Home Alone had earned $285.8 million at the domestic box office and $190.9 million in foreign markets. The movie’s $$476.7 million global haul made it the third-highest grosser ever both domestically and worldwide. Home Alone also held the record for the highest-grossing live-action comedy for two decades until it was eclipsed by The Hangover Part II. In addition, Macauley Culkin, who portrayed Kevin McCallister, became the hottest child star in Hollywood. The film received mixed-to-positive reviews from professional critics, who singled out Culkin’s performance for particular praise. Hal Hinson of the Washington Post called Home Alone “rambunctiously funny” and lauded its “big payoff” but complained that the “setup” was a “drag.” As for the film’s lead actor, Hinson wrote, “What's not to love? Culkin's adorable.” Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times praised the movie’s title and Culkin’s “gifted” performance but excoriated the plot, which he described as “so implausible that it makes it hard for us to really care about the plight of the kid.” Ebert also dismissed Kevin’s booby traps as “the kinds of traps that any 8-year-old could devise, if he had a budget of tens of thousands of dollars and the assistance of a crew of movie special effects people.” When the Academy Award nominations were announced in early 1991, Home Alone received nods for composer John Williams’ Christmassy score and the theme song “Somewhere in My Memory.” However, John Barry ended up winning Best Original Score for Dances with Wolves—that year’s Best Picture winner—and “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)” from Dick Tracy nabbed Best Original Song.
Although it currently holds a lukewarm 67 percent rating on the movie review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Home Alone is widely considered a Christmas film classic and has become a television staple during the holiday season. The movie even received a presidential endorsement; reportedly, Home Alone was the favorite film of Gerald Ford, America’s 38th commander-in-chief. Also, as a testament to its enduring popularity, the movie has spawned four sequels (two of them direct-to-video) and a reboot that was released just a year ago. (Because of Home Alone’s popularity, it has been the target of numerous parodies. My personal favorite is from the animated sitcom Family Guy in which the Griffins watch a movie on television titled Home Alone with Competent Robbers. A second parody that I highly recommend readers check out can be found in an episode from The Critic, another animated sitcom, in which film critic Jay Sherman previews an upcoming movie titled Home Alone 5. This parody is also great fun, but the most hilarious thing about it is that, years after the episode aired, Hollywood ended up making a fifth film in the Home Alone series.)
I loved Home Alone as a kid and watched it numerous times. However, prior to writing this retrospective review, I hadn’t seen the film in nearly three decades—though I often catch bits and pieces of it on television during the holidays. While viewing Home Alone from start to finish for the first time in years, I still enjoyed it greatly. This is a funny, entertaining, and touching Christmas movie that perfectly encapsulates the spirit of the holiday. The closing scenes during which Kevin and Old Man Marley (who I suspect was named after the character Jacob Marley in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol) reunite with their families always brings tears to my eyes. The partnership between John Hughes and Chris Columbus—who would go on to direct a number of other family films, including the first two entries in the wildly popular Harry Potter series—was a match made in movie Heaven. And the cast is a delight. Macaulay Culkin, who earned a well-deserved nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, was critical to Home Alone’s success, but he also had great help from talented supporting players. John Heard and—especially—Catherine O’Hara are utterly convincing as Kevin’s worried parents. Joe Pesci gave my favorite performance in the movie. Pesci, who has starred in a number of other comedies like the wonderful My Cousin Vinny, is hilarious in Home Alone as the irritable, bumbling crook Harry. (Coincidentally, Pesci also played a hot-headed criminal in another 1990 film, Martin Scorsese’s violent mob classic Goodfellas, and his performance in the latter movie—released just two months before Home Alone—would earn him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Also of interest, Culkin appeared in a second 1990 film, Adrian Lyne’s psychological horror film Jacob’s Ladder, which was released just two weeks before Home Alone and, like Goodfellas, is the Christmas movie’s polar opposite in terms of theme, tone, and style.) Daniel Stern is tolerable here as Marv Murchins, Harry’s dimwitted partner in crime, but, with the notable exception of his voice-only performance as the adult Kevin Arnold in the hit television series The Wonder Years, I’ve never been a fan of Stern as an actor. One of the joys of Home Alone is seeing the late, great John Candy. Candy, who starred in several other Hughes films, including Planes, Trains & Automobiles and Uncle Buck, plays Gus Polinski, a Good Samaritan who takes pity on Mrs. McCallister and helps her get to Chicago in time to reunite with Kevin on Christmas Day. (Like Culkin and Pesci, Candy appeared in a second 1990 film, Disney’s The Rescuers Down Under, which was actually released the same day as Home Alone—and suffered at the box office for it.)
One of the things I love most about Home Alone is that it’s a sort of inversion of It’s a Wonderful Life, another Christmas movie. In Frank Capra’s 1946 classic, George Bailey, the protagonist, sees what would have happened to his loved ones if he had never existed; in Home Alone, Kevin McCallister sees what life is like when his loved ones aren’t around. Although I don’t know this for sure, I suspect that John Hughes was influenced by It’s a Wonderful Life when he wrote the script for Home Alone; the Capra film even makes a brief appearance in Home Alone and its immediate sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. I also suspect that Home Alone took inspiration from the ironically humorous short story “The Ransom of Red Chief” by O. Henry. I like that Home Alone provides an interesting twist on Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey in that Kevin undergoes many stages of this transformational experience while never actually going anywhere (at least in a physical sense). I’m also fascinated by how Home Alone deals with the issue of religion. At first glance, the film’s Christmas message appears to be a secular one about the importance of a family being together during the holiday, and there’s no indication that the McCallisters are Christians who attend church on anything like a regular basis. And yet, two scenes are infused with religious symbolism. The first comes near the halfway point when Harry and Marv nearly hit Kevin with their van. When he sees Harry’s gold tooth, Kevin recognizes the crook as the “policeman” who visited his house the night before his family left for Paris and walks away with a troubled look on his face. This disturbs Harry, and he and Marv decide to follow Kevin in order to discern where he lives. When Kevin realizes that he’s being tailed, he flees to a church and disguises himself as one of the figures in a nativity scene that’s located near the door. Thinking Kevin has gone inside the church, Harry and Marv grow uncomfortable with the prospect of pursuing him further and drive away. The significance here is that the church provides Kevin sanctuary when he needs it most. Later on in the film, when Kevin meets Old Man Marley in the (same?) church, the two of them discuss regretting past words and deeds and reconciling with family members while the choir sings “O Holy Night,” a Christmas carol that contains lyrics about love and redemption. And speaking of music, another key factor in Home Alone’s success as a Christmas movie is John Williams’ fantastic score, parts of which were clearly inspired by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s seminal Nutcracker ballet. The song “Somewhere in My Memory,” based on Williams’ theme for Home Alone, is one of my all-time favorite Christmas songs.
While I acknowledge Home Alone’s status as a Christmas classic, it is not a film classic. By no means is this movie a cinematic work of art. Home Alone is a film that I enjoy watching around Christmastime but would never want to see during any other part of the year. This is in sharp contrast to It’s a Wonderful Life, a genuine masterpiece that I can watch and enjoy anytime. Also, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, John Hughes’ Thanksgiving film classic, is vastly superior to Home Alone. Similar to what Roger Ebert noted in his review, Home Alone’s central problem is that the plot is so ridiculously implausible that it comes dangerously close to being farcical. Now, to be fair, the movie does go to considerable lengths in an effort to establish some plausibility. For example, when you watch the scene where the family rushes out of the house and to the airport and leaves Kevin behind, you can understand how something like that could happen. Also, there’s another scene where Kevin is in a store holding a toothbrush when Marley comes in. Frightened, Kevin runs away without paying for the item. Thinking he is shoplifting, the lady at the counter has one of her co-workers pursue Kevin. He soon enlists the help of a nearby policeman, but Kevin eludes capture. Afterward, he regrets what has happened, saying to himself “I’m a criminal” in a pitiful voice. This scene cleverly provides a rationale for why, when he learns about Harry and Marv’s wicked designs on his house, Kevin doesn’t go to the police.
However, the premise of Home Alone still has more holes in it than a block of Swiss cheese. For instance, it’s odd how many adults in this movie appear to have no problem with the fact that this eight-year-old boy is clearly by himself. This includes the aforementioned lady in the store, a man dressed in a Santa costume, and Marley himself. And when Mrs. McCallister calls the police in Chicago to inform them of the situation, they don’t seem to be too concerned about the fact that a little kid is all alone in a large house in a mostly deserted suburban neighborhood. But the biggest logical hole in Home Alone is the fact that the McCallisters appear to not have any domestic staff. Given the fact that they’re a wealthy family with five kids who live in a mansion, it’s simply implausible that they wouldn’t have any housekeepers, cooks, maids, or other hired help of some kind. But then again, if they did, there would be no movie. Ultimately, Home Alone is a lovable film filled with silly fun and excessive schmaltz and is entirely devoid of the intelligence and insight found in other holiday classics like It’s a Wonderful Life and Groundhog Day.
In closing, I would like to discuss my idea for an alternate ending to Home Alone that, in my view, would have really given audiences something to talk about. In this version, after Old Man Marley rescues Kevin from the burglars, he takes him to his house and gives the boy some hot chocolate. After Marley leaves the kitchen to go to the john, Kevin opens his walk-in freezer and discovers a pile of mummified corpses. To his shock and horror, he realizes the rumors were true, that Marley really is the South Bend Shovel Slayer—which explains why he was able to dispatch Harry and Marv with great ease. Marley suddenly returns to the kitchen, and when he sees that Kevin has discovered his horrible, no-good secret, he tries to murder him with his shovel in order to ensure the boy’s silence. After barely managing to escape a premature death, Kevin runs back to his house. He must now repeat his Christmas Eve ordeal, only this time, instead of being pursued by two bumbling crooks, he has to deal with a cold-blooded serial killer. Okay, I know the filmmakers could never have made this ending, but a fellow can dream, can’t he?
Lookback/Review by Markdc
One of my favorite childhood memories is going to a church Christmas party with my family when I was ten years old. It just so happened that a new movie theater had opened in our town (the old one was destroyed in a fire several years earlier), so the adults gave out movie passes to me and my siblings as well as the children from another family. Then all us kids piled into my parents’ station wagon, and my oldest brother drove us to the theater, and we saw a new family comedy that had recently come out called Home Alone. We loved the movie, and, apparently, so did everyone else.
In case you’re one of the handful of people in the Milky Way Galaxy who has never seen Home Alone or at least heard of it, the plot centers around Kevin McCallister, an eight-year-old boy who resides in a wealthy suburb of Chicago, Illinois. He experiences as miserable an existence as is possible for a rich, able-bodied, blond-haired White kid living in a resplendent mansion. Kevin, the youngest child in his family, doesn’t get to stay up late and watch violent movies and gets picked on by his older siblings—and his situation isn’t helped by the fact that he's a spoiled brat who can’t even tie his own shoelaces without assistance. On the night before his family is scheduled to fly to Paris, France to spend Christmas with relatives, Kevin gets into an altercation with Buzz, his oldest brother, at dinnertime. This results in a huge mess, and Kevin gets sent to bed by his mom. Feeling aggrieved, he makes a solemn wish for his entire family to disappear. As though in reply, a terrible storm reigns down upon his neighborhood and wrecks the power lines. With no electricity, the alarm clocks in the house shut off, and everyone oversleeps as a result. In their haste to get to the airport and make their flight to Paris, Kevin’s family accidentally leaves him behind. When he wakes up and discovers that he’s—wait for it—home alone, Kevin believes his wish has come true. Meanwhile, his parents realize their mistake during the flight to Paris, and once they reach their destination, Mrs. McCallister takes a plane back to the States in what proves to be the first leg of a lengthy and often frustrating journey to return home and reunite with her youngest child. At first, Kevin revels in his newfound liberation and does all the things he’s always wanted to do but wasn’t allowed, such as jumping on his parents’ bed, going into Buzz’s room, and staying up late and watching “bad” movies while eating all kinds of delicious junk. However, he gradually misses his family and regrets the wish he made. Worse yet, he discovers that someone is coming to his house—and it ain’t Santa Claus. Two burglars named Harry Lime and Marv Murchins, who go by the name “Wet Bandits,” have been robbing homes in Kevin’s neighborhood and makes his house a prime target due to its size and opulence. Over the next few days, Kevin comes up with various clever schemes to keep the crooks away. Meanwhile, he learns to become self-sufficient by doing things he’s never done before, such as showering, grocery shopping, and using the washer and dryer. Furthermore, Kevin learns how to overcome his fears. During the course of the movie, the thing that scares him the most is his next-door neighbor, “Old Man” Marley, because of rumors that have circulated among the neighborhood children that he’s a serial killer. Nicknamed the “South Bend Shovel Slayer,” Marley supposedly murders people with his—you guessed it—snow shovel. However, Kevin ends up meeting Marley while the two are watching the latter’s granddaughter (whom Marley has never met) perform in a church choir and discovers that the rumors about the old man are false. The two have a heart-to-heart, and Kevin urges Marley to reconcile with his son, with whom he had a falling-out years ago, so that he can be with his family on Christmas and see his grandchild. Harry and Marv eventually learn that Kevin is—wait for it—home alone and plan a break-in on Christmas Eve night. But Kevin overhears them discussing these plans and sets up elaborate booby traps around the house. The robbery is foiled when the unwitting crooks fall victim to these traps, and Kevin calls the police and taunts Harry and Marv into chasing him to a neighboring house that they had burglarized earlier. But the pair outsmart Kevin this time and catch him. They are about to exact revenge when Marley comes up from behind and knocks them out with his snow shovel. The police soon arrive and arrest the Wet Bandits, and on Christmas morning, Mrs. McCallister returns home, and she and Kevin reconcile before discovering, to their surprise and delight, that the rest of the family took a direct flight from Paris to Chicago and are back, too. Shortly afterward, Kevin looks out a window and witnesses another joyful reunion between Marley and his son and his family. All is well at the McCallister household—until the sequel.
Written and produced by John Hughes—the creator behind some of the most popular comedies of the 1980’s, including Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—and directed by Chris Columbus, Home Alone was released in the United States on November 16, 1990. Though it ran overbudget and ended up costing a then-hefty $18 million, the movie was a runaway smash hit and played in theaters for well over nine months. When it finally came to home video, Home Alone had earned $285.8 million at the domestic box office and $190.9 million in foreign markets. The movie’s $$476.7 million global haul made it the third-highest grosser ever both domestically and worldwide. Home Alone also held the record for the highest-grossing live-action comedy for two decades until it was eclipsed by The Hangover Part II. In addition, Macauley Culkin, who portrayed Kevin McCallister, became the hottest child star in Hollywood. The film received mixed-to-positive reviews from professional critics, who singled out Culkin’s performance for particular praise. Hal Hinson of the Washington Post called Home Alone “rambunctiously funny” and lauded its “big payoff” but complained that the “setup” was a “drag.” As for the film’s lead actor, Hinson wrote, “What's not to love? Culkin's adorable.” Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times praised the movie’s title and Culkin’s “gifted” performance but excoriated the plot, which he described as “so implausible that it makes it hard for us to really care about the plight of the kid.” Ebert also dismissed Kevin’s booby traps as “the kinds of traps that any 8-year-old could devise, if he had a budget of tens of thousands of dollars and the assistance of a crew of movie special effects people.” When the Academy Award nominations were announced in early 1991, Home Alone received nods for composer John Williams’ Christmassy score and the theme song “Somewhere in My Memory.” However, John Barry ended up winning Best Original Score for Dances with Wolves—that year’s Best Picture winner—and “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)” from Dick Tracy nabbed Best Original Song.
Although it currently holds a lukewarm 67 percent rating on the movie review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Home Alone is widely considered a Christmas film classic and has become a television staple during the holiday season. The movie even received a presidential endorsement; reportedly, Home Alone was the favorite film of Gerald Ford, America’s 38th commander-in-chief. Also, as a testament to its enduring popularity, the movie has spawned four sequels (two of them direct-to-video) and a reboot that was released just a year ago. (Because of Home Alone’s popularity, it has been the target of numerous parodies. My personal favorite is from the animated sitcom Family Guy in which the Griffins watch a movie on television titled Home Alone with Competent Robbers. A second parody that I highly recommend readers check out can be found in an episode from The Critic, another animated sitcom, in which film critic Jay Sherman previews an upcoming movie titled Home Alone 5. This parody is also great fun, but the most hilarious thing about it is that, years after the episode aired, Hollywood ended up making a fifth film in the Home Alone series.)
I loved Home Alone as a kid and watched it numerous times. However, prior to writing this retrospective review, I hadn’t seen the film in nearly three decades—though I often catch bits and pieces of it on television during the holidays. While viewing Home Alone from start to finish for the first time in years, I still enjoyed it greatly. This is a funny, entertaining, and touching Christmas movie that perfectly encapsulates the spirit of the holiday. The closing scenes during which Kevin and Old Man Marley (who I suspect was named after the character Jacob Marley in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol) reunite with their families always brings tears to my eyes. The partnership between John Hughes and Chris Columbus—who would go on to direct a number of other family films, including the first two entries in the wildly popular Harry Potter series—was a match made in movie Heaven. And the cast is a delight. Macaulay Culkin, who earned a well-deserved nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, was critical to Home Alone’s success, but he also had great help from talented supporting players. John Heard and—especially—Catherine O’Hara are utterly convincing as Kevin’s worried parents. Joe Pesci gave my favorite performance in the movie. Pesci, who has starred in a number of other comedies like the wonderful My Cousin Vinny, is hilarious in Home Alone as the irritable, bumbling crook Harry. (Coincidentally, Pesci also played a hot-headed criminal in another 1990 film, Martin Scorsese’s violent mob classic Goodfellas, and his performance in the latter movie—released just two months before Home Alone—would earn him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Also of interest, Culkin appeared in a second 1990 film, Adrian Lyne’s psychological horror film Jacob’s Ladder, which was released just two weeks before Home Alone and, like Goodfellas, is the Christmas movie’s polar opposite in terms of theme, tone, and style.) Daniel Stern is tolerable here as Marv Murchins, Harry’s dimwitted partner in crime, but, with the notable exception of his voice-only performance as the adult Kevin Arnold in the hit television series The Wonder Years, I’ve never been a fan of Stern as an actor. One of the joys of Home Alone is seeing the late, great John Candy. Candy, who starred in several other Hughes films, including Planes, Trains & Automobiles and Uncle Buck, plays Gus Polinski, a Good Samaritan who takes pity on Mrs. McCallister and helps her get to Chicago in time to reunite with Kevin on Christmas Day. (Like Culkin and Pesci, Candy appeared in a second 1990 film, Disney’s The Rescuers Down Under, which was actually released the same day as Home Alone—and suffered at the box office for it.)
One of the things I love most about Home Alone is that it’s a sort of inversion of It’s a Wonderful Life, another Christmas movie. In Frank Capra’s 1946 classic, George Bailey, the protagonist, sees what would have happened to his loved ones if he had never existed; in Home Alone, Kevin McCallister sees what life is like when his loved ones aren’t around. Although I don’t know this for sure, I suspect that John Hughes was influenced by It’s a Wonderful Life when he wrote the script for Home Alone; the Capra film even makes a brief appearance in Home Alone and its immediate sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. I also suspect that Home Alone took inspiration from the ironically humorous short story “The Ransom of Red Chief” by O. Henry. I like that Home Alone provides an interesting twist on Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey in that Kevin undergoes many stages of this transformational experience while never actually going anywhere (at least in a physical sense). I’m also fascinated by how Home Alone deals with the issue of religion. At first glance, the film’s Christmas message appears to be a secular one about the importance of a family being together during the holiday, and there’s no indication that the McCallisters are Christians who attend church on anything like a regular basis. And yet, two scenes are infused with religious symbolism. The first comes near the halfway point when Harry and Marv nearly hit Kevin with their van. When he sees Harry’s gold tooth, Kevin recognizes the crook as the “policeman” who visited his house the night before his family left for Paris and walks away with a troubled look on his face. This disturbs Harry, and he and Marv decide to follow Kevin in order to discern where he lives. When Kevin realizes that he’s being tailed, he flees to a church and disguises himself as one of the figures in a nativity scene that’s located near the door. Thinking Kevin has gone inside the church, Harry and Marv grow uncomfortable with the prospect of pursuing him further and drive away. The significance here is that the church provides Kevin sanctuary when he needs it most. Later on in the film, when Kevin meets Old Man Marley in the (same?) church, the two of them discuss regretting past words and deeds and reconciling with family members while the choir sings “O Holy Night,” a Christmas carol that contains lyrics about love and redemption. And speaking of music, another key factor in Home Alone’s success as a Christmas movie is John Williams’ fantastic score, parts of which were clearly inspired by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s seminal Nutcracker ballet. The song “Somewhere in My Memory,” based on Williams’ theme for Home Alone, is one of my all-time favorite Christmas songs.
While I acknowledge Home Alone’s status as a Christmas classic, it is not a film classic. By no means is this movie a cinematic work of art. Home Alone is a film that I enjoy watching around Christmastime but would never want to see during any other part of the year. This is in sharp contrast to It’s a Wonderful Life, a genuine masterpiece that I can watch and enjoy anytime. Also, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, John Hughes’ Thanksgiving film classic, is vastly superior to Home Alone. Similar to what Roger Ebert noted in his review, Home Alone’s central problem is that the plot is so ridiculously implausible that it comes dangerously close to being farcical. Now, to be fair, the movie does go to considerable lengths in an effort to establish some plausibility. For example, when you watch the scene where the family rushes out of the house and to the airport and leaves Kevin behind, you can understand how something like that could happen. Also, there’s another scene where Kevin is in a store holding a toothbrush when Marley comes in. Frightened, Kevin runs away without paying for the item. Thinking he is shoplifting, the lady at the counter has one of her co-workers pursue Kevin. He soon enlists the help of a nearby policeman, but Kevin eludes capture. Afterward, he regrets what has happened, saying to himself “I’m a criminal” in a pitiful voice. This scene cleverly provides a rationale for why, when he learns about Harry and Marv’s wicked designs on his house, Kevin doesn’t go to the police.
However, the premise of Home Alone still has more holes in it than a block of Swiss cheese. For instance, it’s odd how many adults in this movie appear to have no problem with the fact that this eight-year-old boy is clearly by himself. This includes the aforementioned lady in the store, a man dressed in a Santa costume, and Marley himself. And when Mrs. McCallister calls the police in Chicago to inform them of the situation, they don’t seem to be too concerned about the fact that a little kid is all alone in a large house in a mostly deserted suburban neighborhood. But the biggest logical hole in Home Alone is the fact that the McCallisters appear to not have any domestic staff. Given the fact that they’re a wealthy family with five kids who live in a mansion, it’s simply implausible that they wouldn’t have any housekeepers, cooks, maids, or other hired help of some kind. But then again, if they did, there would be no movie. Ultimately, Home Alone is a lovable film filled with silly fun and excessive schmaltz and is entirely devoid of the intelligence and insight found in other holiday classics like It’s a Wonderful Life and Groundhog Day.
In closing, I would like to discuss my idea for an alternate ending to Home Alone that, in my view, would have really given audiences something to talk about. In this version, after Old Man Marley rescues Kevin from the burglars, he takes him to his house and gives the boy some hot chocolate. After Marley leaves the kitchen to go to the john, Kevin opens his walk-in freezer and discovers a pile of mummified corpses. To his shock and horror, he realizes the rumors were true, that Marley really is the South Bend Shovel Slayer—which explains why he was able to dispatch Harry and Marv with great ease. Marley suddenly returns to the kitchen, and when he sees that Kevin has discovered his horrible, no-good secret, he tries to murder him with his shovel in order to ensure the boy’s silence. After barely managing to escape a premature death, Kevin runs back to his house. He must now repeat his Christmas Eve ordeal, only this time, instead of being pursued by two bumbling crooks, he has to deal with a cold-blooded serial killer. Okay, I know the filmmakers could never have made this ending, but a fellow can dream, can’t he?