Eater - Feast your eyes on a Thanksgiving film

A chaotic Thanksgiving dinner scene from the 1995 film Home for the Holidays | Getty Images

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I am writing this eight days before Thanksgiving; by the time you read it, you will likely already have your menus, restaurant reservations, or plans to ignore the holiday firmly in place. As someone who began planning Eater’s Thanksgiving coverage months ago, I myself am more or less done thinking about Thanksgiving.

Instead, I’m thinking about the Thanksgiving film, a genre that is frequently overshadowed by that of the Christmas film. To be fair, the two are largely interchangeable, with their dysfunctional families and sprawling meals that nobody seems to actually eat. But a number of Thanksgiving films really go hard on the dysfunction, whether it’s John Candy driving Steve Martin to the brink in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Parker Posey bedding her twin brother in The House of Yes, or Louise Lasser being stalked by one of her murderous twin sons in Blood Rage. These movies seem to understand that this time of year is deeply fraught for a lot of people, and that going home to spend time with family isn’t necessarily a win for mental health.

For me, the ur-Thanksgiving film is Home for the Holidays, a thorny 1995 comedy directed by Jodie Foster and starring Holly Hunter. Hunter plays Claudia, a single mom who gets fired from her job right before she travels to Baltimore to spend Thanksgiving with her, yes, dysfunctional family. There’s Anne Bancroft as her bewigged, chain-smoking mother, Charles Durning as her passive father, Robert Downey Jr. as her gay brother, and Cynthia Stevenson as her blatantly homophobic sister. There is a lot of bickering, some real ugliness that isn’t smoothed over by the film’s comedic tone, and the meal itself, which employs turkey in a truly catastrophic way. All of the food in Home for the Holidays looks notably unappetizing; watching Downey try to carve the turkey is like watching a low-budget horror movie.

Home for the Holidays is a far from perfect film, but it does contain a moment of perfect emotional truth that comes in a conversation between Hunter and Bancroft. When Hunter tells her that “nobody means what they say on Thanksgiving ... it’s what the day is supposed to be all about,” Bancroft replies, “that, and giving thanks we don’t have to go through this for another year ... when you go home, do you look around and wonder, who are these people? Where did I even come from?”

If there is anything more Thanksgiving than trying to fill the existential void with huge quantities of food, I have yet to find it. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

More holiday reading:

There are so many great reasons not to eat turkey on Thanksgiving. Here’s another one, in the form of this Washington Post story about an animal sanctuary that offers non-euphemistic turkey cuddling.
Though it’s not strictly related to Thanksgiving, McSweeney’s “It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers” continues to remain a classic.
And if you’re looking for another great Thanksgiving movie, may we suggest Addams Family Values?