1987 Directed by Bill Forsyth
In the Pacific Northwest during the 1950s, two young sisters whose mother has abandoned them wind up living with their Aunt Sylvie, whose views of the world and its conventions don't quite live up to most people's expectations.
"Sleep is so much better when you're really tired. You don't just sleep. You die."
"We should be doing other things; we're just hiding up here."
Scottish writer/director Bill Forsyth's Housekeeping is a sumptuously atmospheric coming-of-age hangout film that from what I recall matches the tone of the Marilynne Robinson source novel pretty well. In fairness, though, it's been so long since I read it (at the recommendation of my favorite college professor) that I'd mostly forgotten what to expect—with only the most indelible passages giving me a sense of déjà vu.
Housekeeping traces the precarious lives of Lucille and Ruth (from whose perspective the story is told), two directionless girls stuck in a buttoned-down Idaho town, grasping for stability and identity after their disturbed mother pulls a half-Walkabout—that is to say, ferries a pair…
Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, not unlike Toni Morrison's novels, is so slim that you have to sit there and wonder how so few pages can contain such a vast, cosmic understanding and depth of vision. That Bill Forsyth was able to capture its magnetic, haunting poetry of alienation and the yin-yang necessity of chaos and order is impressive enough. That he was able to turn it into truly funny comedy is a feat for the ages. In nearly every scene you can see how this so easily could have collapsed like a house of cards, but Forsyth's gift for displaying the uncanny and bizarre as fundamental to our sense of normalcy and Lahti's pitch-perfect portrayal of Sylvie as a person who…
this has the unfortunate disadvantage of being an adaptation of one of the most aesthetically and emotionally fulfilling novels of all time. Forsyth is keyed into Robinson's humor and I think he really gets Sylvie (Lahti's no slouch, duh) and the look of this is great. probably too literal a work - I wish he'd found a way to express the dreaminess of it all, the mist, the madness, etc.
Rarely have I seen chaos portrayed with such delicacy and beauty. Shimmering gold and silver cans stacked like building blocks, newspapers with seemingly endless purposes, nameless cats spontaneously materializing and overflowing trenchcoat pockets.
I put off watching this adaptation of my favorite book because I was turned off by its description of being a comedy-drama. I thought it would be a misguided interpretation of Marilynne Robinson's 1980 novel. Housekeeping is the story of two sisters, Ruthie and Lucille, whose lives are colored by loss. they are raised first by their grandmother, who had lost her husband in a spectacular train accident, then later by their eccentric great aunts lacking any maternal instinct, and finally by Sylvie, their aunt who is restless, uprooted, incapable of staying still—and yet she is asked to make a house into a home for her two young nieces. Ruthie and Lucille grow apart, the former becoming more like her…
maybe the best depiction of loneliness, without sinking you in it. christine lahti is so warm, with her pockets full of little treasures she’s collected, and her ability to make everything feel okay. all these women carry around a loneliness, but what’s interesting is to see how they try to reject it. when they see their pain reflected in someone else, do they turn away from it, or linger around them, protected by what they both know?
Bill Forsyth's 1987 film Housekeeping is indelible sadness; distilled through pure Americana. It may not have the sheer overwhelming dense prose of the haunting Marilynne Robinson novel (Robinson is one of my favourite authors, her novel Gilead is simply flawless). Robinson's prose is beautiful, particularly when describing the elemental nature that bestrides the novel; the water, the sky, death, depression and religion. She tackles major themes with a light touch, but a fullness of feeling. It is to Bill Forsyth's great credit that he manages to translate almost all of these to the screen, though he is significantly less interested in the deep Calvinist streak of religion that propels all of Robinson's work. It is a film with a really…
"Usually we started for home when we smelled the hobos' supper, a little like fish and a little like rubber. And so we would return to the house that had become Sylvie's, where we would find her enjoying the evening, which is how she described her habit of sitting in the dark. It was pleasant when she remembered to scold us for coming home late or getting our shoes wet." (my favorite voiceover lines)
Like Local Hero, Housekeeping is a Bill Forsyth film that, on the simplest level, examines the meaning of home. For some people, home is the place where they live and the objects they possess; for others, it's a matter of emotional geography, being with the people…
Gracefully captures the troubled, yet charming, relationship between two sisters and their eccentric aunt after tragedy strikes.
Quite simply, one of the prettiest and most thoughtful films about mental illness I've seen. Housekeeping lacks judgement but doesn't shy away from awareness of disarray. Christine Lahti is fantastic as is the choice to show her aunt's mania through the splintering of sisters who accept or try to run away from that energy and how their lives will be very different because of it.
Housekeeping is so dreamy, like a tucked-away memory. Not only through Ruth's narration, but through the film itself and how it smoothly moves from one moment to the next, as if there were no in-between moments, as if it's memories appearing one after the other. It's fog-bathed and hazy and magical in a way that only exists when someone reminisces of their childhood.
The central relationship between the two sisters, so close yet so different, is incredibly moving—their devotion to one another, stemming from so much loss and grief, from an experience only they two can understand, and their eventual separation both show the immense love they have for one another.
The film contrasts loneliness from secludedness so well. From…
