Housekeeping is a 1987 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Bill Forsyth and starring Christine Lahti, Sara Walker, and Andrea Burchill. Based on the 1980 novelHousekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, the film is about two young sisters growing up in Idaho during the 1950s. After being abandoned by their mother and raised by elderly relatives, the sisters are looked after by their eccentric aunt whose unconventional and unpredictable ways affect their lives. Filmed on location in Alberta and British Columbia, Canada, Housekeeping won two awards at the 1987 Tokyo International Film Festival.
Plot
Teen sisters Ruth and Lucille, raised by a grandmother after their mother's suicide, end up living with an aunt in a western U.S. town called Fingerbone after the grandmother dies. Aunt Sylvie is an unusual woman. She likes to sit in the dark and sleep in the park. Others in town are never quite sure what to make of her. And the same holds true for the girls, even when Sylvie writes elaborate excuses to get them out of school.
Housekeeping was the first North American film by writer and director Bill Forsyth, whose previous films—That Sinking Feeling, Gregory's Girl, Local Hero, and Comfort and Joy —were produced in Scotland. Forsyth's screenplay for the film is based on the 1980 novel Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. It was in fact the prospect of bringing the novel to film that brought him to America. Forsyth would later describe his film version as an attempt to "make a commercial to get people to read the novel". Forsyth had been sent a copy of the book by an actress friend and he loved it. "There is in it that generational haunting that affects most of us," Forsyth says, "those familial burdens we all carry: the grandfather in the story they never knew but who seems to be there all the time." Forsyth bought the screen rights and took two years to raise money to finance it. "We took it to studios who had expressed interest in it; we didn't just send it out wildly. I didn't get anywhere. I tried to work out various co-productions. At one point it was going to be a Canadian-Norwegian co-production, but that fell apart. I had some English money, but not enough." Diane Keaton agreed to star and based on this Cannon Films agreed to finance. However Keaton pulled out six weeks before filming and Cannon withdrew finance. "That was one horrendous week," Forsyth says. Forsyth succeeded in raising finance from David Puttnam, who had produced Local Hero and who was appointed head of production at Columbia. Christine Lahti played the lead. Forsyth said, "I had always written the story and the script before, and therefore I was the expert on the characters. But these characters, this strange woman and those two unpredictable young girls, were up for grabs. I began to look forward to that half-hour each morning when we discussed the characters and what the day's scenes meant."
In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby described the film as a "haunting comedy about impossible attachments and doomed affection in a world divided between two kinds of people"—those who pass aimlessly through life and embrace random existence, and those who seek to impose reason and order on random existence. These two types are represented by the eccentric aunt Sylvie, who wanders aimlessly from town to town, and Lucille, who longs to establish familial roots and "live the way other people do". The relationship between Lucille and her sister Ruth is transformed as the latter grows increasingly drawn to her aunt's way of life. Canby notes that Forsyth is able to "make us care equally" for both sisters. Canby described Lahti's performance as "spellbinding" in this "role of her film career": Canby is equally impressed with Sara Walker's portrayal of Ruth and Andrea Burchill's Lucille, noting that "every member of the cast is special". Canby concluded: In his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars, calling it "one of the strangest and best films of the year". According to Ebert, Lahti was the perfect choice to play the central role of Sylvie. Ebert concluded, "At the end of the film, I was quietly astonished. I had seen a film that could perhaps be described as being about a madwoman, but I had seen a character who seemed closer to a mystic, or a saint." On the AllMovie website, Housekeeping has an editorial rating of four and a half out of five stars.
