Housekeeping (1987)

The Worst Film Ever

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

hard to put this film into words, it is so vivid you can almpst feel the cold air of spokane winter in its scenes. The auntis not 'unstable' she is played to perfection by lahti, who is so real in the role it is absolutely scary. she , along with the oldest girl, are in their own world for survival from some extremely crazy tragic events. The flood house scene and railroad tracks and 'girls week off by the lake from school' are classics. The mother's final scenes and scary music interlude haunts forever. This even inspired my trip on a train up to spokane.It shows the eldest girl staring at her shoes, and we think of how much childhood is to lose, and how overwhelming it is , the possibility of a relative losing custody, that we will do anything t o preserve some happiness, childhood ONLY comes once, and the heavy Grey sadness these girls have is unbearable. The neglectful aunt who collects brown old newspapers to the rooftops. all classic showings of those who ride the train rails and what MAKES us hobos. Drifting our hands out of the boat in the midnight lake

I wish this movie were available on DVD!!!Christine Lahti does her typically superlative job of depicting a woman whose values come from the heart rather than deriving from the dictates of western civilization. As always, she expresses the best of the free spirit which I believe can be found in any one of us.Two young sisters end up in the custody of their aunt Sylvie, who has spent her life having abandoned the trappings of western civilization in general and of consumerism in particular.In order to support her young nieces, Sylvie returns from the wild, so to speak, and helps to raise the girls in a manner which allows them to see the freedom of disassociation from society and its dictated "norms".

For a director as accomplished as Bill Forsyth, this film, while not without its charming and interesting moments, looked puzzlingly like the rather earnest but gauche first feature of a recent film-school graduate. Most puzzling is the strangely under-developed script. To the exclusion of almost everything else, the film focuses on three characters (Aunt Sylvie and nieces Ruth and Lucille), and on the time when the action unfolds. Interaction with other characters is minimal, but more importantly, no depth or roundness is given to the leads by dialogue that would reveal something about their characters or fill in something of their back-story. We are left utterly in the dark as to the motivation for the apparently light-hearted suicide of the young girls' mother, Helen (this isn't a spoiler, by the way - it's how the film opens), and we learn nothing more about her during the film that would shed any light on the question. Similarly, we can discern (though it is never openly stated) that Sylvie has spent a lot of time hoboing, but the question of how this came about, and whether it was the cause or effect (or entirely unrelated to) the breakdown of her marriage, is never broached. Her husband, and Helen's husband (the girls' father), are also blank holes in the story, despatched with in one line of Sylvie's dialogue each. We learn absolutely nothing about Sylvie's relationship with her sister Helen, or with their parents. Most centrally, Ruth's almost complete lack of motivation in any direction (responding to every question with "I don't know" or "I suppose so") means that, dramatically speaking, the film has a blank at its centre. All this makes it pretty hard to sustain an interest in the film for two hours.This basic structural weakness of the script gives the film a flat, two-dimensional, untextured quality. The building-up of a sense of character through the amassing of information about them, and of a sense of place by the accretion of small details, are (with the exception of the much dwelt-on railway bridge) completely missing. These are things Forsyth certainly knows how to do - "Gregory's Girl" and "Comfort and Joy" both do them, delightfully, from beginning to end - which makes his involvement here all the harder to fathom.A fine performance from Christine Lahti, given the pretty thin material she had to work with. A minor quibble about the sound: with dialogue recorded on set and (as far as I could tell) no studio re-recording, some of the non-professional cast's mumbling delivery of the lines is hard to make out.

Years since I saw it in the moviehouse or video. NOT a comedy in the yuk yuk sense. I only wish I could have been on the set to say, "Bill, Focus more on the girls, not the aunt! You did them both so well!" It was just a question of balance in this absorbing movie. Christine Lahti had such a good, strong performance and Forsyth let her take the movie, or at least gave many viewers the idea that her character's the focus. Stunning scenery, wonderful evocation of family and place, and fascinates with its exploration of watery metaphors for our connection to and removal from people. Very faithful in tone to the book (a must-read by marilyn robinson, BTW), which I read after seeing the movie more than once. I wish I could see it on the big screen again.