Starting over is not for beginners.
Her role here is hardly a stretch but Reese Witherspoon still shines in Home Again, a lightweight but enjoyable chick flick about a fretful, newly single 40-year-old mom trying to restart her life.
She’s just moved back to her Los Angeles hometown from New York with her two daughters when they end up sharing their swanky Los Angeles abode with a trio of cute twentysomething guys who are trying to break into Hollywood (played by Pico Alexander, Nat Wolff and Jon Rudnitsky).
In a reversal of typical age-gap romances, Witherspoon’s interior designer Alice has hooked up with one of the trio after a boozy night out to celebrate her watershed birthday, but his likeable friends contribute to the household in their own ways, as one of her friends enviously observes: ‘Free live-in childcare, full-time tech support and sex!’
As its plot and setting suggest, Home Again is very much escapist fluff, but Witherspoon’s screen charm just about makes it work, with help from Michael Sheen as Alice’s self-centred estranged husband, Candice Bergen as her wry, broad-minded mother, and Lake Bell as her snooty design client.
Incidentally, but not coincidentally, writer-director Hallie Meyers-Shyer is the daughter of rom-com queen Nancy Meyers, so if you enjoyed such films as Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated, there’s a fair chance you’ll enjoy this offering as well.
Certificate 12. Runtime 97 mins. Director Hallie Meyers-Shyer
Available on Blu-ray, DVD & Digital from Sony Pictures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-oFOgFB2uM
