Thoughts on The House of Yes

   On Criterion, I watched the 1997 film The House of Yes, written and directed by Mark Waters and adapted from the play by Wendy MacLeod. I had seen the film as a teenager, but had forgotten a lot aside from Parker Posey's character being obsessed with Jackie Kennedy, dressing as her in her Halston pillbox hat and pink suit. Rewatching it, I really liked it as a dark comedy that deals with an obsession with Jackie Kennedy, mental illness, and a dysfunctional family, with Tori Spelling as the new fiancée who just walks into all this mess and is completely blindsided.  

  Set at Thanksgiving in 1983, Marty (Josh Hamilton) and his fiancée Lesly (Spelling) arrive from New York City to McLean, Virginia to visit his family: his mother (Genevieve Bujold), his brother Anthony (Freddie Prinze, Jr.), and his twin sister, Jackie-O (Posey), who just got released from a psychiatric hospital. Jackie-O is obsessed with Jackie Kennedy, and the film opens with a childhood home video from 1971 of a young Jackie-O (Rachael Leigh Cook) recreating Jackie Kennedy's famous TV tour of the White House, reciting her dialogue as she makes her way through their expansive home. She connects the loss of JFK with the loss of her father, and has been deeply psychologically impacted, as well as having an unhealthy relationship with her brother Marty, bonding over trauma, which Anthony tries to warn Lesly about.

    Parker Posey is fantastic in this film. She has this airiness to her voice that can capture so much with subtle humor, saying dark things with a deadpan face, and laughing to get past anything that is uncomfortable for her. She is a gem to watch, is delightfully weird, and I'm happy that Criterion is doing a retrospective of her work, many of which I have seen, from Party Girl to Clockwatchers to Broken English. I love that even when she's in more mainstream movies and TV, she still stands out as being charming and interesting, like in Blade: Trinity as a vampire or Josie & the Pussycats as an insecure record exec wanting to be seen as cool by teenagers.

    Besides Posey, the cast in this film works well as a strong ensemble. Freddie Prinze, Jr. in an early role shows a lot of heart as an awkward brother who has stood witness to his twin siblings' disturbing relationship, and is trying to woo Lesly away from his brother to spare her from learning about it. Josh Hamilton comes off as a straight-laced dork trying to appear normal and together, but gets lured back into the dysfunction by his sister. Genevieve Bujold as Mrs. Pascal is more of a conservative and wealthy mother who turns a blind eye to what is going on with her children. Rachael Leigh Cook as a young Jackie-O has brief screentime, but captures the energy and manic feelings that would further affect Jackie-O later in life. And Tori Spelling is sweet and naive as the newcomer to the family who thought that Marty was just a normal person and believed his cover stories about his scar or thinking that Jackie-O was in a regular hospital.

    It's a wonderfully weird dark comedy, and Mark Waters would go on to direct the teen classic Mean Girls, as well as many other Hollywood films. I'm happy I revisited it and got to understand it much more as an adult and pick up a lot more on the details of the family dysfunction.