One of Alain Resnais' more mainstream films, including American actors and characters in a mostly English language script. It is deservedly forgotten. Quite frankly, it's garbage. Adolph Green (of the musical team Comden and Green, who worked on Singin' in the Rain and The Bandwagon) plays a curmudgeonly Cleveland comic strip writer who is invited to Paris for a gallery show on American comics. He hopes to finally see his daughter (Laura Benson), who hasn't spoken to him in the two years she's been going to college there. Benson finds her father lowbrow, though, and ditches him, hoping she can finally catch up to her professor (Gerard Depardieu). Unbeknownst to her, Depardieu is secretly a huge fan of American comic strips, and ends up inviting Green and his girlfriend (Linda Lavin) to stay with him at his mother's country estate. Benson, when she finds out, decides to follow them. The problems with this movie are many, but the worst one is that Green is an enormous, enormous jerk. He spends the whole film yelling at everybody, frequently complaining at as loud a volume possible about how horrible the French are. You know there's a problem when you want to bludgeon the main character of a movie to death within ten seconds of his first appearance. Second, Benson is a complete bitch. I think part of it is that the actress (whom I think is French, since she only seems to have appeared in other French films) is awful. She comes off as totally emotionless and unnecessarily mean (though I can understand why she wouldn't want to be anywhere near her father, she treats Lavin, who always comes off as a nice person, like crap for no reason). Third, Green's cartoon cats often pop up in animated thought bubbles to tease both Green and Benson. This is especially unfunny and hugely obnoxious, particularly since Green voices the cats with his awful, nasal voice. The film does get a little better as it goes on. The cartoons fade away and Green, who starts to appreciate France after he meets Depardieu, calms the Hell down. But it's still utterly unfunny and I'd like to forget it was ever made.
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zetes16 March 2014
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FilmCriticLalitRao4 May 2007Before shooting "I want to go home", if Resnais had thought of keeping somebody in mind, it is quite possible that he must have had ruminated about both American and French public. "I want to go home" shows why French fascinate Americans so much. It is a fairly honest portrayal of why French have all the respect for Americans. It is so hard to believe that this comic film was made by Resnais. For the last five decades, he has remained a highly intelligent intellectual cinéaste who has excelled in making difficult films about memories. Watching his films can be likened to a concentrated reading of a "stream of consciousness" oeuvre. Not only will this film charm die-hard francophiles like Paul Auster, Johnny Depp, William Fiedkin, Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley and John Malkovich but also fans of comic strips as it is not so often that one comes across a feature film in which there is a happy marriage of cartoons and film. Through this quirky work, Resnais has advocated popular culture as in today's world Mickey Mouse, Snoopy, Charlie Brown and Garfield are as relevant/necessary and useful for everybody as Flaubert, Stendhal and Sartre. "I want to go home" is a light film which provides a multiplicity of meanings for its viewers. On an elementary level it explores cultural differences between French and American people. On another level it is also a tale of an amicable reconciliation process which happens between a father meeting his daughter after many years. This emotional turmoil has been shown in a very dignified indeed subtle manner. Although it might seem odd, this film makes it absolutely clear that French have a penchant for admiring those American artists who have been ignominiously rejected/ignored back home in USA. One classical example is Samuel Fuller. He enjoys a bigger, dedicated fan following in France than in United States of America. "I want to go home" is a film which can be understood by all kinds of artists. It speaks of different arts like cinema, comics etc. This is why Resnais has collaborated with great artists like Enki Bilal, Jules Feiffer and John Kander. The highlight of this film is the fact that it shows how all arts are interrelated as well as mutually beneficial. In "I want to go home" the characters alternate between serious mood and comic mood. This is because people can't always remain funny or serious. Resnais makes us all imbibe a logical lesson that in our daily lives we have to react according to the situation in which we find ourselves. Lastly it is high time that it is said that although Americans might abhor French or vice versa, the truth is that both of them cannot live without each other.
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philosopherjack1 April 2022The main character of Alain Resnais' I Want to Go Home, Joey Wellman, is a veteran American cartoonist (but not one of the top-tier ones, his work barely celebrated now) in Paris for a convention; his almost estranged daughter is already there, studying at the Sorbonne and trying to shed her roots, fixated on getting her thesis on Flaubert to the attention of a public intellectual (Gerard Depardieu) who however is more interested in the old man. The cartoonist is played by Adolph Green, much better known as a songwriter than an actor (I Want to Go Home isn't a musical, but sometimes seems on the verge of becoming that); others involved in the project include Jules Feiffer, John Kander, Linda Lavin, Geraldine Chaplin and John Ashton (at the time widely recognizable from Beverly Hills Cop and other mainstream movies), with references ranging from Victor Hugo to Krazy Kat - it's surely a unique mixture of cultural coordinates, carrying the sense of a cultural puzzle to be unlocked. This manifests itself for much of the way as sometimes grating and repetitive conflict (Joey's complaining about even the smallest aspect of French culture might profitably have been pared back at least a little), although ultimately leading to a rather mysterious transference in which some of the central characters reorient their affiliations and arrive at reconciliation; the final shot in which Joey's temporary new home in the country sprouts into a Disneyland-like castle is the final assertion of possibility. Ultimately, for all its annoyances, the film insists that one might find delight even in the most unlikely locations and interactions, if one is only open to it. And of course, if that's not so easy, you can draw on the common ground of cultural touchstones- those small-town French people may not recognize the most basic words of English, but they know "Clint Eastwood"!