Review: Home Again (12A)

Beautiful, rich people try to convince us that being single is the end of their privileged worlds in first-time director Hallie Meyers-Shyer's rom com.
By The Newsroom
Published 29th Sep 2017, 08:36 BST
NEW START: Reece Witherspoon as Alice Kinney in Home Again. PA Photo/STX Entertainment/Karen Ballard.NEW START: Reece Witherspoon as Alice Kinney in Home Again. PA Photo/STX Entertainment/Karen Ballard.
NEW START: Reece Witherspoon as Alice Kinney in Home Again. PA Photo/STX Entertainment/Karen Ballard.

Home Again is cut from the same luxurious fabric as The Holiday and It’s Complicated, films penned by Nancy Meyers, the director’s proud mother.

Emotional syrup evidently runs in the family because Meyers-Shyer drizzles gooey sentiment over every frame of her contrived wish-fulfilment fantasy about a recently separated wife, who stirs the loins of three potential suitors.

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The marriage of perky fortysomething homemaker Alice Kinney (Reese Witherspoon) to music executive Austen (Michael Sheen) has recently broken down. She relocates to LA, to the home of her Oscar-winning director father, where she nurtures their daughters two daughters with help from film star mother (Candice Bergen).

Coincidence flings a trio of aspiring twentysomething filmmakers into Alice’s rarefied world and they take up temporary residence in her guesthouse. Sexual tension percolates between Alice and one of them, dreamboat Harry (Pico Alexander), until a jealous Austen arrives unannounced, intent on patching up the marriage. Home Again unfolds in a picture perfect alternate reality, in which lonely singletons cry perfect tears to a soundtrack of Aretha Franklin, Carole King and Johnny Mathis.