Parker Posey was the It Girl of independent film in early 1997, the year this film (along with three or four others in which she starred) all played at the Sundance Film Festival. This film was the toughest of the bunch to embrace, based as it was on a self-consciously quirky off-Broadway play about Thanksgiving at the home of a particularly strange family. Oldest son Josh Hamilton comes home from college for the holidays, with fiancée Tori Spelling in tow. What he hasn’t told …
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This wonderful comedy of manners had some of the best dialogue I’ve heard in ages. The ensemble cast plays off each other brilliantly. Despite showing Parker Posey (who’s brilliant in this) on the cover with a gun, it’s more talk than action in this blackest of black comedies.
Set 20 years after the Kennedy assasination, it follows a demented wealthy Washington family through about 12 hours wherein the brother brings home a fiance and the rest of the family tries to intervene.
Caveat: Don’t watch it on a first date.
Every once in awhile a cast comes together which actually does justice to what was already a wonderfully comedie noir script. The House of Yes is exactly that movie.
To overly simplify the plotline, there once were two twins. They had a sexual (read: incestual) relationship. One decided to be normal and left for the big city. He came out closer to normal. The other decided to stay behind. She went crazy. Their younger brother is none-too-bright. Their mother doesn’t know if all her children are from the same man.
When the male twin returns home with his new fiancee for Thanksgiving, everything falls apart. Oh, did I mention they have an obsession with the Kennedy’s?
This is not a Sinbad-style gag movie. This is a dark, funny movie. The casting was perfect. Parker Posey portrays perfectly (absent alliteration) a semi-psychotic woman who evinces both lunacy and feline lethality. Josh Hamilton is all the more disturbing for the degree of normalcy he brings to the role of Marty. Freddie Prinze Jr. plays the part he was born to: a half-witted simpleton. Tori Spelling plays the part SHE was born to: a half-witted simpleton who is actually more clueless than Freddie. Genevieve Bujold tops it all off with her disinterested matriarch character who — after examing the situation — casually notes that ”Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to baste the turkey and hide the kitchen knives.”
I leave you with two sets of quotes that should give you a taste for the dialoge, and let me state for the record that there is not one word in this film that doesn’t have a joke or hidden subtext to it. It may be the best-written movie ever.
– Brian
Quotes taken from the Internet Movie Database.
Genevieve Bujold: What’s that gun doing there?
Parker Posey: It’s not a gun. It’s a camera.
Genevieve Bujold: It’s a gun.
Parker Posey: It’s a camera that looks like a gun.
Josh Hamilton: Relax, Mama, it isn’t loaded.
Genevieve Bujold: How do you know?
Josh Hamilton: I checked.
Genevieve Bujold: What’s it doing there?
Parker Posey: Being gunlike, gunesque, gunonic.
Genevieve Bujold: Where did it come from?
Parker Posey: God?
—–
Tori Spelling: I don’t think you’re insane.
Parker Posey: You don’t?
Tori Spelling: No.
Parker Posey: You don’t think I’m an eensie weensie bit insane?
Tori Spelling: I don’t think you’re insane. I think you’re just spoiled.
Parker Posey: [exasperated] Oh please, if everyone around here is going to start telling the truth, I’m going to bed.