A Christmas classic that never grows old: Revisiting Home Alone’s magic

Macaulay Culkin, who played Kevin in Home Alone and its sequel Home Alone 2, recently mused about returning to the series as a grown-up. He floated an idea that he would be interested in for another sequel — he would play a divorced or widowed dad who is locked out of the house by his miffed child. And in the place of the rogues in the original movie, it would be a grown-up Kevin who is trying to get into the house, evading the traps his child sets up. The idea was greeted with mixed responses — clearly, many held fond memories of the original movie.

There’s no better time to fall back on this holiday special than Christmas Day.

Everything about the film feels Christmassy as it opens into a snowy town with houses lit up in the night, full of screaming children. Joe Pesci is in the opening shot, dressed as a cop, trying to get the attention of an adult in a noisy big house where 15 to 20 people are scampering up and down the stairs and talking all at once. He finds out that the family is leaving for Paris in the morning and takes his leave. We’d soon learn that he’s a thief when he returns the next day with an accomplice in tow. But unbeknownst to the bumbling burglars, one little fellow is left behind.

Kevin is introduced as a troublesome eight-year-old who does not know how to pack his bag for the Paris trip. The older siblings and cousins mock him for being so clueless, and Kevin invariably picks a fight with his brother Buzz, creating havoc in the kitchen. He is sent to bed, where he makes his angry declaration that he wants his family gone.

And his wish is granted, thanks to a failed alarm and a miscount of children. Kevin’s first reaction on realising he is alone in the home is pure and unadulterated excitement — he jumps on the bed, runs in and out of rooms, slides down the stairs, and hogs all the food he can munch on. Whether you’re an adult, a teen or a child, you can’t help but indulge in this fantasy as you watch him go through the stuff of his older brother, access whatever has been forbidden before, watch videotapes and tire himself out. A home all to yourself when you are eight — what will you not do with it?

The bubble bursts a little when fear crawls into the child’s head. The old coal furnace in the basement appears like a monster in his imagination, and the old man in the neighbourhood looks ferocious, like a murderer. And let’s not forget, there are also the real threats of two lurking burglars in the form of Pesci and Daniel Stern at their comic best. The film gets its big twist (spoilers ahead for those yet to watch it) on the night that the two men come into the house and fall for all the traps little Kevin has laid out for them — from the toy air gun shooting pellets to oily stairways, piping hot door handles and falling iron boxes. Sequences after sequences of physical comedy are made enjoyable by the inimitable performances of Pesci and Stern. Their stunned faces at every nasty turn are a sight to behold.

A still from Home Alone, featuring Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci (IMDb)

Macaulay, with his flickering expressions of pure joy or screams of fear, delivers an unforgettable Kevin. His conversations, uninhibited and straight from the heart, are sprinkled with simple solutions that only a child could offer. The exchange in the church between him and the old man he was scared of is endearing because it is so direct, without the layers of filtering that adult conversations are made of.

Picking a favourite scene is not easy, and you may find yourself overlooking the parts involving the distressed mother, who is rushing back to be with her forgotten child, blaming herself all the way. Yes, you sympathise with her, but somehow Kevin’s world steals the focus, and you are impatient to come back to it.

Clearly, writer John Hughes was very much in touch with the workings of a child’s mind and was right to trust his script with Chris Columbus, who would prove to be a master filmmaker in this genre. He would go on to make the sequel Home Alone 2 and the first two of the Harry Potter movies to great acceptance.

Music, including a selection of Christmas beats, uplifts the mood if you let it sweep you over, especially in the climax, where Kevin watches another family reunion through his window and lets the unmentioned spirit of Christmas hang in the air between them.

If any wishes are to be granted this Christmas, let it be Culkin’s — a chance to revisit Kevin’s world and recapture that magic one more time.

Cris is a feature writer based in Kerala.