The dysfunctional family movie has seen so many different iterations over the years that it’s become a sort of subgenre unto itself. Oftentimes suburban (at least with respect to US output), consistently caustic, the best dysfunctional family movies capture both the inextricable ties that keep people together no matter the adversity and the infighting and bitterness that can often come from the very same.
The release of This Is Where I Leave You sees yet another entry into the pantheon of films where blood ties lead to all kinds of infighting. Based on the wonderful Jonathan Tropper novel (who adapted his own work for the film’s screenplay), This Is Where I Leave You chronicles a tense week in the life of the Altman clan after the patriarch of their estranged family passes away. As they gather under the same roof to bid him farewell, a great many buried resentments are dredged up, spurred on by Judd’s (Jason Bateman) recent cuckolding at the hands of his oafish boss (Dax Shepard).
The source material is equal parts wistful, unflinching, and uproariously funny, and while time will tell if the film follows suit, we thought we’d take this opportunity to offer up some thoughts on our favorite tales of family chaos and the sequences that best define them. Check out our list, and feel free to talk over your own favorites with us.
-Dominick Suzanne-Mayer
Film Editor
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
For a movie that looks a lot like a lot of other Sundance dramedies on the surface, Little Miss Sunshine is a rarity among them in that it sticks with you long after it ends. Though the vestiges of indie-movie quirk are there (name actors in unconventional character roles, outmoded vintage items as plot points, a soundtrack by a well-regarded indie rock band), the film is less about its surface traits and a lot more about how families interact and how sometimes a group of people who can’t stand one another are the best support system for each member.
The film takes on everything from body dysmorphia to suicide to drug addiction to the American spirit of competition, but it never stops being funny or a film about the Hoovers and their struggles as they attempt to support Olive (Abigail Breslin) and her dream of winning a beauty pageant. Most poignantly, it’s the selectively mute Dwayne (Paul Dano), Olive’s older brother, who captures the film’s spirit in his climactic silence-breaking freak-out. Chastising his entire family for their delusions and endless bickering, he collapses into a pile of tears until his sister shows him a bit of kindness and kinship. And so Dwayne picks up shop and gets back on the family bus.
Little Miss Sunshine is at once hilarious and devastating, a film where the threats of mortality and failure hang over Devotchka’s sun-soaked score and the Hoovers at every moment, but it’s ultimately a story of how failure is completely relative, ending in the Hoovers finally coming together as a group. And being banned from the California youth pageant scene for life. They can’t all be wins. –Dominick Suzanne-Mayer
The Host (2006)
It’s quite upsetting that should you attempt to find Bong Joon-ho’s ingenious monster movie/family dramedy hybrid The Host, a search won’t lead you to the film you’re looking for, at least not right away. Thanks, Stephenie Meyer!
Anyway, despite making his English-language directorial debut with this year’s Snowpiercer, Joon-ho’s 2006 film should’ve been an even bigger hit Stateside. Starting off as the story of a barely functioning, estranged unit, The Host eventually asks the motley lot to work through their problems, lest they fall victim to a grotesque fish monster, one created due to government negligence and the dumping of toxic waste into a river in Seoul.
The dissention and bickering ends up having unexpected consequences, particularly in a sequence in which Park Gang-Du (Song Kang-ho) attempts to arm his father (Byun Hee-bong) in order to buy time for the family to escape, only to realize that he miscounted the number of shots left in the weapon. But that’s the thing about The Host. Even as the bodies pile up and the Park family runs the risk of being taken apart forever, it’s as much about them trying to overcome their petty differences as it is the gigantic nuclear sea creature threatening the city, and particularly its sewers. It’s a feel-good-ish popcorn movie for people who don’t like it when their popcorn movies talk down to them. –Dominick Suzanne-Mayer
Ordinary People (1980)
After two hours of skirting around heartbreak and repressing their true feelings, Calvin (Donald Sutherland) finally tells Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) how he feels. The long-married couple lost one of their sons in a boat accident. The grief is staggering. Their surviving son, Conrad (an Oscar-winning Timothy Hutton), is going to counseling because he watched his brother die. Beth has been burying her feelings for a long time in upper-class suburban parties and shopping and deflective conversations. It’s the veneer of normalcy that sustains her. Calvin can’t stand it anymore, like there’s no humanity left in her. He needs to say something honest and for her to feel something again. He needs to grieve. Sitting alone, by a window, in his large, empty home, he puts his cards on the table for Beth. “You know something? You’re determined, Beth. But you’re not strong.”
Moist-eyed and upfront, Calvin asks if she can do anything honest anymore and if she has any love left to give. Or did her soul die? He loved her once and still probably does. But does she love anything anymore? Right then and there, we see the dissolution of not only a marriage, but a family too, because they can’t brave their feelings together. Ordinary People dares to look at a family in crisis and let you know that everything’s not okay. Calvin and Beth separate that day, not with a bang, but a well-furbished whimper. Judith Guest’s affluent family melodrama is written in a way that doesn’t garner cynical remarks. And Robert Redford adapted that story in such a way as to maintain and even intensify the emotional heartbreak of a family in a north suburban Illinois. Ordinary People is a familiarly big hurt. –Blake Goble
