Movie Review: A Home of Our Own (1993)
I haven’t watched this movie recently, so I hope I can do a good review of it. It reminds me a lot of Joe the King. Like Joe the King, A Home of Our Own is also supposed to based on a true story (in Joe the King, the main character is Joe Henry, the scriptwriter is Frank Joseph Whaley; in A Home of Our Own, where the narrator is Shayne Lacy, the scriptwriter is Patrick Sheane Duncan. Kinda neat, huh?).
Of course, everything that happens to a character in a film or book shouldn’t always be assumed to have happened in real life. For example, Patrick F. McManus, Robert Newton Peck, J.G. Ballard, etc. all have characters with their names — and not everything should be assumed to have happened.
That said, this movie’s tone is similar to Joe the King — not much happy happens here, great scenery, filming, good acting — and yet, so much bad happens that it is either true-to-life or badly edited.
Having commented on that, I should also say that due to the amount of time this film spends in its environment — a house being built, literally, by scrounging — you really get to know where the characters live. I wish I could say you get to know all the characters, but there are a lot of them — six children in the Lacey family, only two of which get any particular character development, and the mother, played by Kathy Bates. As usual, Kathy Bates looks and acts like a completely different person in this role than she did in, say, Fried Green Tomatoes, as she should. Like Joe the King, the movie also seems a lot longer than its actual length.
The main parts of the story deal with family warfare between Bates’ character, Frances Lacey a no-nonsense, hard-working, old-fashioned poverty-stricken widow, and her 15 year old son Shayne, the man-of-the-family. (Something she continually reminds him of throughout the film). (One of the repeated funny lines concerns Frances’ husband, referred to consistantly cheerfully as “that Irish son-of-a-bitch” by all concerned).
Like Joe the King, the pattern of A Home of Our Own is set within the first minutes of the film. Shayne is brought home by the police. Frances defends him, then calls for the belt to punish him for petty crimes. This is what makes her decide to move the family into the country.
In fact, in a 104 minute film, Frances calls for the belt about six or seven times if I remember correctly — until it is pretty much assumed that every time Shayne raises his voice, he’s going to get it. (But the film only shows one moment where Frances really physically loses it). Eventually, I began to understand this film in the context of a family study of the time period (the film is set in 1962).
It’s clear that Frances loves her children, though she never apologizes to them, and in fact the driving point of the movie is that she does everything for them, but it seems selfish because she thinks she can go out on dates but the children for example don’t need time to play or toys to play with. Frances wants to instill in them the self-respect to accept no charity — so that when Murray, the only other well-defined family member, barters in a wonderful salvage yard — you understand that she has made a positive impression.
In the context of, say, a working-class family of 1911, the film makes more sense. In that time period, you were expected to work as a general rule, to play as you worked — and people were not neccessarily going to praise you for that. All wages belonged to your family. All work was for the good of the family as a unit. What we think of today as becoming an adult may not have been true then. Doing the work of an adult did not neccesarily mean you were free of family discipline. For example, in one account of the Triangle Fire in 1911, a 16-year-old returned home from the fire, dirty, disheveled, etc. and got a beating from her family (I forget what the reason was, but of course, when they learned of the fire, they were sorry — I also forget which book this is from). In Little Britches by Ralph Moody, Ralph has vocational training at age 8, herding cows and being a cowboy at a ranch. His father says they are partners, and there is one scene in the book where Ralph steals a bit of chocolate, reasoning that it is his because his wages go in the pot. His father finds him, spanks him, and tells him that because they are partners, he could have had the chocolate due to his wages if he had asked and not snuck around.
Set in this type of context, A Home of Our Own makes more sense. Frances never apologizes because her children are children. She is the head of the family and if she wants to go out after working, she has earned that right. The children, meanwhile, are part of the unit of the family, and thus should work on buiding the house — and are shown to be in general remarkably willing to do so. (There is one well-done scene involving a construction accident and Murray). Shayne’s viewpoint is, I assume, that he is the man of the family, which he doesn’t particularly want to be, but if he is, he’s old enough to want to speak like an equal, to address things that he believes are unfair, such as Frances telling fairy tales of how life will be. Frances sees this not as a man-of-the-family trying to act in the role but a child acting in defiance to her.
Interestingly, despite the younger children shown doing destructive things like scribbing on Shayne’s homework or acting up in the car, Frances is seen being rather lenient toward them. There are other complications, too many almost, but there are good scenes as well– the nieghbor, Mr. Moon coming over for holiday dinner, Frances’ boss surprising her by his support, townspeople paying tips with power tools, a scene with the “family bathtub etc.)
I should also say that I have only seen one other film with a salvage yard (The War, 1993) and this film does a great job with that, and with the thrift store the Laceys frequent as well.
The other Lacey children in the film are basically there to complete the large impoverished family and are unfortunately underdefined. If they were poor, something good must have happened. Indeed, the good that happens in the end is somewhat manipulative, but makes sense — though I also feel that it comes too close behind the final show-down between Shayne and his mother to be as effective as it probably should. (For one thing, even if Frances loves her kids, and even if the family bands together as a “tribe,” you are geniunely afraid for what will happen to Murray — and no, it doens’t involve his accident). Also, much like Joe the King, and like real life, any change that happens in this movie is very small — there are no massive Scrooge-redemption moments here, and maybe that’s as it should be.
Having said all this, I would probably watch this again, simply because as much as I would have preferred parts of the film to do otherwise, they must have done something right or I would not be able to think of a character study to do on it. Most films would not show enough to build on.