Home Again (2017)

Home Again arrives from Hallie Meyers-Shyer, daughter of Nancy, and it carries the family DNA in every sunlit frame. Reese Witherspoon plays Alice Kinney, a separated mother of two who returns to her late father's Los Angeles house, attempts to launch an interior design business, and within a day has installed three aspiring filmmakers in the guest cottage. The film is a romantic comedy about nice people being nice to each other in expensive rooms. The rooms are very nice. The people are very nice. Very little happens, and it happens at a pleasant pace.

The gender politics are modest but present. A woman wrote it, a woman directed it, and the protagonist is a forty-year-old mother who pursues her own work, tolerates no nonsense from her estranged husband, and requests a divorce on her own schedule. That is a genuine point of view. It is also delivered inside the standard rom-com chassis, with a younger suitor, a misunderstanding, and a reconciliation, so the progressive content stays decorative. Nobody delivers a speech about it. Nobody has to.

Which brings us to the long list of things the film declines to discuss. Race does not come up. Neither does sexuality, environmental concern, or the ethics of inherited wealth, despite a cast of Hollywood-adjacent creatives living off a dead director's estate. The elder daughter has some writing anxiety and finds a kindly mentor, though the movie treats this as ordinary childhood nerves, not a condition with a name. The whole enterprise is allergic to instruction. It wants to be a warm bath, and it succeeds at being a warm bath. We have sat through many films that shouted at us for two hours. This one whispers nothing at all, and there is a certain relief in that, even if the tub runs cold.