How "Home Alone" became a cult New Year's movie. Analysis
Actor Macaulay Culkin has stated that he is ready to play the role of Kevin again in the sequel to the film "Home Alone", where the grown-up hero will try to reunite with his family. The first two films of the franchise, where young Culkin played, turned out to be the most successful and were included in the mandatory New Year's program in many countries of the world. How the story of a boy who was forgotten by his parents turned into the main holiday movie story is described in the Izvestia article.
The cult tale
• The movie "Home Alone" has become a cult film for an entire generation of millennials. It was released in 1990, and everyone whose childhood and youth fell on the 1990s and early 2000s watched it every year on Christmas and New Year's Eve.
• Thanks to the film, new expressions have appeared in everyday life. For example, the term to be home alone describes a situation where other films have lost money at the box office due to the continued success of the film. "Home Alone" topped the rental rating for three months, and after that, during the same period, it remained the most popular picture and collected the main box office. The film remained the box office leader for 27 years, for which it was included in the Guinness Book of World Records as the highest-grossing American comedy with live actors.
• The success was facilitated by a successful combination of features that made the film a classic Christmas movie. First of all, it's fabulous. Despite the fact that there is no magic in the film, it is essentially a fairy tale in which a little boy fights evil, wins and returns his family. The hero gets a big house at his disposal for a while, which a child can only dream of, bravely confronts adults and builds clever traps that would hardly work in real life, and these are also elements of a fairy tale.
• Color plays an important role in creating the festive atmosphere of the film. Bright red and green details are found in almost every frame. Additionally, the fairy tale effect was achieved thanks to the framing: from the moment Kevin stays home alone, the shooting is carried out from the height of the child's height, making the ceilings seem higher, the walls wider, and the corridors more mysterious.
• Director Chris Columbus consciously sought to make the picture relevant for any time. The McCallister house's design was designed to appear modern even after decades. After the release of the film, this gave rise to the "Kevin effect": people tried to recreate the same environment, and the colors red and green became firmly embedded in American interiors.
Psychological aspects
• The title of the film plays up not only the situation when a child is left at home alone, but also the condition of a child who is not needed by his family. Viewers pay attention to the fact that brothers and sisters are disdainful of Kevin, and adults do not listen to him. The punishment itself, when a child is left in the attic overnight, knowing that it scares him, looks unfair. Kevin finds warmth not in his family, but in the same "outcasts" like himself — old man Marley or the lady with pigeons.
• Forgotten by his family and left alone, the hero of the film goes a long way from feeling permissiveness to realizing his responsibility for his loved ones. Going through these trials, he grows up: in the finale, Kevin manages not only to defend his house and dress it up for the holiday in anticipation of his loved ones, but also to participate in the life of the lonely old man Marley, pushing him to reunite with his family.
Coincidentally, the lead actor had a difficult family situation, as Columbus mentioned. Macaulay was the third of seven children, and the parents were more interested in their son's fees — later they even started a lawsuit over his trust fund. But on the set, Culkin developed a warm relationship with Catherine O'Hara, who played Kevin's mother. Even years later, Culkin continues to call the actress mom.
Artistic techniques
• "Home Alone" became one of the last films shot using a carbon arc lamp lighting system, which was actively used in cinema until the 1970s. Thanks to this lighting, the colors became warmer and more saturated, and this gave the picture an atmosphere of "good old cinema."
• The effect of carbon arc lamps helped to make the frames of the black-and-white video that the main character is watching as close as possible to the atmosphere of cinema in the noir genre of the 1940s. In reality, the film "Angels with Dirty souls" does not exist, the episodes were shot specifically for the film, and the prototype was the film "Angels with Dirty Faces" in 1938.
• The film was shot without special effects, and the only animation scene involved is the moment when Kevin shoots an air rifle at a bandit with his head stuck in the dog door. The flying bullet was hand—drawn on six frames of film to achieve an animated effect.
• The stuntmen performed stunts with numerous falls of "wet bandits" without safety ropes. The scene where the bandits step on toy cars and fall has become iconic. This stunt, when a stuntman falls backwards and jumps back a long distance, is called "Home Alone."
History of creation
• The movie "Home Alone" appeared thanks to Macaulay Culkin. The screenwriter and director John Hughes initially saw in the main role a boy who successfully played a similar character in Hughes' film "Uncle Buck". The script for the upcoming hit movie was written in nine days: Hughes entrusted the film adaptation of his story to director and screenwriter Chris Columbus, who was good at working with children. It was Columbus who later shot the first two films of the Harry Potter saga, which also became a popular attribute of New Year's holidays around the world.
• Despite the fact that Culkin was immediately recommended for the role of Kevin McCallister, the director conducted a casting and reviewed more than 200 applicants for the main role before settling on the initial candidate. Culkin impressed the director with his immediate reaction and professionalism, and also differed favorably from the usual type of "ideal Hollywood kids." Columbus also tweaked the supporting character line of old man Marley and added a touching Christmas miracle element to the script when Marley reunites with his granddaughter.
The performer of the role of the "wet bandit" Joe Pesci, who previously starred in gangster films, felt uncomfortable on the set of a family comedy. Due to the presence of children on the set, the director forbade adult actors to swear and at one point even suggested replacing the obscene word with "refrigerator". Pesci purposely kept his distance from Kalkin on set so that the young actor would be afraid of him. The fear of the hero of the film in front of the basement is also not faked: the actor was really afraid to go down there.
• Film critics met the picture coldly, but noted that the work of nine-year-old Culkin actually pulled out an uncomplicated plot. The famous scene where Kevin puts cologne-soaked palms to his face and screams after shaving, which became the most recognizable moment of the film, appeared thanks to the improvisation of the young actor: initially, it was assumed that the hero had to pull his hands away.
Fan versions
In the 35 years since the film was released, it has generated a lot of interpretations of the plot and the story of its characters. So, the audience suspected Kevin's father of being in charge of the mafia — later Columbus had to explain that in fact the parents of the main character were engaged in legitimate forms of business. Uncle Frank, who makes a negative impression in the film, was suspected by fans of the franchise that he was the one who brought bandits to his brother's house.
• There is a version that the film became a parody of republican values. The McCallisters are endowed with all the attributes of conservative well-being: living in a prestigious white neighborhood of Chicago, a large family, the ability to keep guns in the house, protecting their homes from encroachments and attending church. Against this background, the scene where Kevin mentions in his lunch prayer those who "discounted pasta" looks ironic.
• There are also completely fantastic theories suggesting that Kevin's mother made a deal with the devil to return to her son as soon as possible, or considering old man Marley to be an adult version of the main character who returned from the future to help Kevin reconcile with his family and change his fate. The brutality with which the main character deals with bandits has given rise to the theory that Kevin could later become a maniac operating in the horror films "Saw" and "Collector".
During the preparation of the material, Izvestia interviewed:
- Natalia Primakova, President of the Guild of Film Critics and Cinematographers of the Union of Cinematographers of Russia, film critic, director and screenwriter of documentary films;
- Soviet and Russian director, member of the Board of the Guild of Film Critics and Critics of Russia David Shneiderov.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
