Following up the enormous cult success of his breakthrough documentary American Movie, filmmaker Chris Smith takes us through five wildly disparate offbeat homes, including a refurbished nuclear-missile silo, a treehouse in the Hawaiian jungle, and one completely redesigned for the convenience of the owners’ dozen-odd cats. In this way it reminded us of Errol Morris’s brilliant Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, which similarly gathered five eccentrics with nothing apparently in common, and drew some deep and surprising connections between them. Although it’s fun to see the quirky lifestyles Smith’s subjects have created so passionately for themselves, Home Movie is not so insightful, perhaps because it was originally commissioned by a corporate real estate website, or maybe its ever-so-humble running time of sixty-five minutes. But when we drive past the endless acres of identical beige suburban townhouses, it’s nice to know that there are some folks out there for whom there really is no place like home.
Leave a Reply