Dysfunctional Family Movies To Watch For Thanksgiving
It's the perfect time to watch movies about families more messed up than your own!
Leo Tolstoy once wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Thanksgiving is next week which probably means it’s time to get together with your own dysfunctional family. So, today we have some of the best cinematic examples of troubled families. Along with our streaming picks, House of Gucci, the highly anticipated Ridley Scott crime drama, opens in theaters next week. It’s the story of the Guccis, a very famous and salacious dysfunctional family, and it stars an A-list cast of Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino, and Jared Leto.
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Billy recommends…
Raising Arizona (streaming on Amazon Prime)
A couple trying to become a family in order to fix their dysfunctional life. A tale as old as time! The Coen brothers direct this kidnapping comedy with two established stars at the helm. Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter bring a quirky charm to these nincompoops.
Cage plays H.I. McDunnough, a repeat offender that ends up in jail time and time again. On one fateful stint in prison he meets officer Ed played by Hunter. H.I. is a love-at-first-sight kind of guy with a beautiful way of words. He is constantly raining sweet nothings down on Ed, but she is obviously trying to keep at a distance being his correctional officer. The charm wears her down though and after a third stint in prison for H.I., they get married. The next step is for them to have a baby. Unfortunately, they are not able to. Adoption agencies won’t allow them to adopt because of H.I.‘s checkered past. What do they do now?
They decide they are going to kidnap a child from a famous family in town. The family recently had quintuplets so they “have too much to handle.” It’s the right thing to do. H.I. and Ed become even more dysfunctional despite acquiring the part of their life they thought was going to fix it. The ensuing shenanigans are some of the funniest Coen brothers moments in their entire filmography. All accompanied with a sweet and quirky disposition.
Drew recommends…
The Meyerowitz Stories (streaming on Netflix)
Writer-director Noah Baumbach is no stranger to stories of family, marriage, and divorce. His 2005 breakout film, the Sundance and Oscar-feted The Squid and the Whale, was a semi-autobiographical story of his parents’ divorce when he was an adolescent. More recently, the highly acclaimed Marriage Story found him exploring a crumbling marriage once again, this time based on his own divorce. With 2017’s The Meyerowitz Stories, Baumbach assembled a collection of very familiar faces to portray the deeply flawed Meyerowitz family.
Dustin Hoffman plays Harold Meyerowitz, a retired sculptor and complicated father to three children: Danny (Adam Sandler), frustrated and down-on-his-luck, Matthew (Ben Stiller), financially successful and living across the country, and Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), quiet, kind, and perpetually overlooked. Harold has been married four times and has a spotty record as a dad, but his three kids reunite in New York for his career retrospective as an artist.
The Meyerowitz Stories doesn’t have the story beats or pacing of a conventional family dramedy, but it does gradually tell a very relatable story of a dysfunctional family fumbling toward reconciliation. You may not have the life experiences of these characters, but you can probably identify with the complex relationships at the heart of this film. Danny, Matthew, and Jean are all existing in the shadow of their father, trying to understand how to relate to him and each other. All of the annoyances and arguments that come with sibling and parental relationships are present, but so are the moments of deep connection and love.
The performances are wonderful across the board, but Sandler impresses the most by far. As Danny, he’s a fundamentally decent man, but the anger and frustration that so quickly explodes when he was Happy Gilmore or the Waterboy are simmering under the surface here. And his heartfelt and beautiful relationship with his daughter make this one of the most emotionally affecting Adam Sandler roles. Baumbach’s sharp and specific writing and direction leaves room for Sandler, Stiller, Hoffman, and the others to lean into their strengths while still believably playing this highly dysfunctional but compassionate family.
Links
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