Film Review: Home Again

Hallie Meyers-Shyer is the daughter of Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, the dynamic directing duo whose marital collaborations include the films Baby Boom and Father Of The Bride, among countless other solo projects. Growing up among such a harvest of commercially successful comedies, Meyers-Shyer had a plethora of storytelling skills to emulate: whipsmart dialogue; unabashed exploration of desire in people over 50; and crowd-pleasing romance. Unfortunately, Meyers-Shyer has chosen to copy her mother's love of hyper-privileged white women and #kitchengoals.

Reese Witherspoon, presumably taking a mainstream film in order to help push her own independent projects, plays Meyers-Shyer's leading lady Alice, who grew up in a Hollywood dynasty (sound familiar?) Alice's glamorous upbringing means she doesn't have to work, but after divorcing her producer husband (Michael Sheen, delightfully slimy), she's looking for meaning in interior design. Because, men: you are replaceable with throw pillows, and don't you forget it. But the beautiful rubbish bins and light fittings that Meyers-Shyer features in awkward close-ups just aren't bringing about personal transcendence. That may explain why Alice ends up offering her guest house to a trio of young filmmakers, who reawaken her sense of marital charity; and in the case of 27-year-old Harry (Pico Alexander, bland), a sense of lust.

Well, lust-lite.

As the film explores Alice's pull between this younger man and her ex-husband, the film is too polite to explore anything tricky or messy. The divorce is amicable, the sex chaste, the young men helpful, well-behaved and generally uncharismatic. The mundane, superficial and hyper-privileged non-conflicts of the plot even dampen Reese Witherspoon's usually irrepressible charm. Everything is so intentionally neat and inoffensive, it becomes just like Alice's interiors: fifty shades of tasteful, boring beige.

2/5. Out Now