Home Again (2017) - Good-looking, LA-set, girly-cute romcom

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Shades of red surround good-looking, popular star Reese Witherspoon on this poster for Hallie Meyers-Shyer's Home Again

 

A recently separated mother of two leaves her affluent home situation on a bender for her birthday and then decides to open her home to three attractive young male filmmakers, who are in need of housing...

Home Again is written and directed by debuting Hallie Meyers-Shyer (The Parent Trap (1998, actress)).

It is a first effort that's a matter of taste; Home Again is enormously girly, enormously cute, and you really better also be a Reese Witherspoon (Sing (2016)) fan to appreciate it, - but if you are then it is also quite rewarding.

The world of film and Hollywood are presented as an environment in a partially loving and partially an exposing way, (Meyers-Shyers has plenty of inside knowledge as the daughter of the great romcom filmmaker Nancy Meyers.) Lake Bell (Drunk History (2019, TV-series)) is good as the 'Hollywood nightmare woman', and Pico Alexander (Hot Air (2018)), Nat Wolff (Stella's Last Weekend (2018)) and Jon Rudnitsky (Set It Up (2018)) work well as the three young men, - despite their characters being something of a woman's dream multiplied by three, because no three guy friends in Hollywood chasing a break are really this good., I am willing to bet.

The fantasy is appealing nonetheless, Lola Flanery (The Mist (2017, TV-series)) is good as the elder daughter, and Michael Sheen (Doolittle (2020)) is ideal as the separated husband, who shows up some time into the story, and (of course) Witherspoon is good and lovely in the middle, rich and naturally never with a word verbalizing the source of her (genre-typical)  wealth. Meyers-Shyer really traces her mother's foot steps here.

Watch a trailer for the film here

Cost: 15 mil. $

Box office: 37.2 mil. $

= Minor flop (returned 2.48 times its cost)

[Home Again was released 7 September (Israel, Ukraine) and runs 97 minutes. Shooting took place from October - December 2016 in Los Angeles, California. The film opened #2, behind It, to an 8.5 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent one more weekend in the top 5 (#4), grossing 27 mil. $ (72.6 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were Mexico with 1.6 mil. $ (4.3 %) and the UK with 1.2 mil. $ (3.2 %). Meyers-Shyer is set to return as writer/director with Goodrich, which is in pre-production. Witherspoon returned in The Mindy Project (2017, TV-series) and theatrically in A Wrinkle in Time (2018). Home Again is rotten at 33 % with a 4.70/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Home Again?