A Home of Our Own

Frances Lacey is a widow with six children; she loses her job in Los Angeles, loads the children into the car and drives north. In Idaho she finds a half-built house. The owner is a man of Japanese descent; Frances tells him they will finish it with their own work and pay him for it. He agrees. The subject is not poverty but the price of pride. Frances accepts no help; she refuses anything she counts as charity and the children pay for it. The film does not make her likeable, and the tension with her eldest son is never fully resolved. The form is everyday: an unfinished house, potato fields in winter, school. The camera watches without inflating anything. The production rests on the screenwriter Patrick Duncan's own childhood; the narrator is the eldest boy and the events are given as the writer remembers them. Kathy Bates took the role shortly after her Oscar years and carries the whole weight of the film. Edward Furlong plays the eldest son. Tony Bill directs. Who it is for: viewers who like family drama and quiet narratives drawn from real memory. Who it is not for: anyone wanting emotional ease; the film pulls things together at the end but there are genuinely hard passages before it.