Film review: Housekeeping (1987)

For about fifteen years after I first saw it (I believe as part of a double bill with Chariots of Fire at the Wellesley cinema in Wellington), I would probably have said if asked that Gregory's Girl was my favorite film.  For that reason I have long wanted to see Housekeeping, the one good American film by the same director, Bill Forsyth.  And now, thanks to the Criterion Channel, I can happily report that it is his masterpiece.  Apparently he said of it that it was an advert intended to get the viewer to read the novel (by Marilynne Robinson), and I fully intend to, now.  The film, which is set in the 50s, is about two sisters (Lucille, small, no-nonsense, Ruthie, tall, dreamy) 

in the care of their slightly ethereal aunt Sylvie.  

They arrive in this situation through a series of misfortunes.  First, their father leaves their mother (this happens before the film), then their mother takes them from their apartment in Seattle into rural Idaho where she drops them off at the house (in a town called Fingerbone) she grew up in and tells them to wait for their grandmother to come home.  She then drives off and drives her (borrowed) car into a lake.  The grandmother does her best to raise the two young girls but Ruthie, who gives a voiceover to the film that is reassuring once you know how it ends, reports that in the seven years she did so, the only person younger than 60 that they saw was the mailman. The grandmother is understandably extra protective of the girls, because not only did her daughter commit suicide, she lost her husband (a figure whose presence looms over the film) in a rail accident when the train he was on went off the rail bridge that goes out of the town and plummeted through the ice, leaving only a couple of suitcases and a lettuce as evidence of the over 200 humans on board).  

The grandfather had moved to the town from his prairie home drawn by the lure of the mountains, and indeed the surrounding mountain scenery is breathtaking.  Anyway, the grandmother dies after seven years, when the girls must be around 14, and they are left alone in the house the grandfather had bought.  Briefly, a couple of the grandmother's sisters move in with them, but they are used to life in the city and can't stand the cold, so they invite Sylvie, who is an itinerant wanderer, to come and stay, whereupon they abruptly depart.  The girls are initially suspicious of Sylvie, who seems, to put it mildly, unreliable, and has strange habits, like hoarding newspaper and tin cans, 

but gradually Ruthie is drawn to her.  Lucille, on the other hand, wants a more normal life and realizes that Sylvie's strangeness is making them local pariahs.  She starts to drift away.  And that's more or less the film.  Sylvie draws Ruthie in and repels Lucille.  Sylvie is played in a career-defining (by her own admission) performance by Christine Lahti, while the girls are non-actors who more-or-less never acted again.  Apparently they were recruited from locals in Canada, where the film was made.  A small tale, but everything is in the telling, and it's done beautifully.  I am amazed at how assured it is, given Forsyth's weakness for whimsy, particularly in the progressively poorer American films he would make.  Perhaps he felt a duty to the novel.  Anyway, it has very funny moments, but the overall feel of the film is poignancy about what you lose as you grow up.  I found the final shot rather uplifting (Lucille has already left, and Ruthie is at risk of being taken away because of a nosy cop, so things are coming to a head) but Jami found it depressing.  You be the judge - I say that this is where the fact that Ruthie is telling the story in voiceover is important.  Anyway, if you haven't watched it, you're in for a treat.  But ask yourself - are you a Ruthie or a Lucille?