The Hidden Canon: Housekeeping
On Bill Forsyth's gorgeous ode to the free spirits of the world
Welcome to the first—or perhaps second, if I retroactively designate my newsletter on Privilege as the inaugural piece—installment of The Hidden Canon, a series of newsletters I hope to do every Friday that’ll cover films that are every bit as great as those in the capital-C Canon, but for some reason or another, have yet to get the attention they deserve. I’ll be using a combination of TSPDT’s list and Letterboxd logs as a rough estimate of a film’s cache among modern cinephiles, with only films that both (1) are not on the TSPDT top 250 and (2) have less than 25,000 logs at the time of writing being considered for this series. As in all endeavors like this, the hope is to shine a light onto some of my favorites that may not be on your radar, but really ought to be.
Housekeeping (1987)
TSPDT Rank: #3,843 (#537 of the 1980s, #3 of 6 by Forsyth in the top 20,000)
The old song goes, “A house is not a home / When there’s no one there to hold you tight / And no one there you can kiss goodnight”. I am reminded of this lyric as I attempt to write about Housekeeping, a film that has occupied my thoughts ever since I first saw it two weeks ago. Both are meditations on the material (house) versus the spiritual (home), and how people often mistake the former for the latter. Both also exquisitely capture the latent, inarticulable yearning the absence of home creates in a person. However, one of them has proven significantly more difficult to write about, perhaps because only one of them is, in this humble writer’s opinion, among the very best examples of its medium’s power.
Housekeeping was Scottish director Bill Forsyth’s first American film. Based on the numbers his films do on Letterboxd, Forsyth isn’t quite a household name among even more seasoned cinephiles, but he’s quickly proving to be a favorite of mine. There’s a deft and gentle touch to his films, which are largely slice-of-life and move with an unhurried but purposeful ease. In them, Forsyth extols the virtues of the everyday man and woman: Well-meaning but imperfect, practical but not consumed by a desire for wealth, valuing human connection for good or ill, and capable of keeping life in perspective. His cinema is one that is concerned with how people are to people, and is uniquely mature without being cynical. In his movies, one can glean a new way of living.
Based on a novel of the same name by Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping centers on two sisters—short and gregarious Lucille (Andrea Burchill), tall and awkward Ruthie (Sara Walker)—who are left to be raised by elderly relatives in the small town of Fingerbone after their mother deliberately drives off a cliff. While they are initially close, the two sisters drift apart over the course of the film, their schism precipitated by the arrival of their latest guardian: Aunt Sylvie (Christine Lahti), their mother’s sister whose eccentricities embarrass Lucille but enchant Ruthie. Unfolding with a delicate and dreamy slowness that mimics the rhythms of small-town life, the film is part slice-of-life and part fairytale, with all the everyday poetry of the former and the imaginative fantasy of the latter.
Now is the part where I admit I’ve yet to read the novel the film was based on, but by all accounts, Forsyth’s adaptation hews fairly close to Robinson’s source material. There is a keenly observed specificity to how the whole thing unfolds, from the inimitable mundanity of Sylvie’s quirks (cleaning used tin cans, hoarding newspapers, sleeping in public parks) to the poetic non-events that demarcate the slow fracturing of the two sisters’ relationship. The film’s use of Ruthie’s narration adds to the entire enterprise a veneer of remembrance, its literary flourishes only achievable through hindsight. It’s difficult to know who to ascribe credit to when you’re not familiar with the source material, but it’s no stretch to imagine that part of what drew Forsyth to Robinson’s book was their philosophical alignment. Despite being an adaptation preceded in Forsyth’s filmography by original screenplays, it feels right at home.
None of this works without Lahti, who imbibes her Aunt Sylvie with a grounded kookiness that can only be described as Laura Dern-esque. Here is a woman who most people might call immature or even mad, yet she has undeniably lived a difficult life and extracted a coherent personal philosophy from that. She isn’t the way she is because she doesn’t know better. Rather, she chooses to live a life that brings her joy and fulfillment because she has seen enough of the world to know that is all that matters in the grand reckoning, societal norms be damned. That is a difficult tightrope to walk, but Lahti pulls it off and then some. If there were any justice, her Aunt Sylvie should have gone down as one of cinema’s most memorable characters: An itinerant prophet espousing a more fulfilling outlook on life.
Sylvie is a woman of many odd obsessions, but none are more thematically relevant than her love for trains. She has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of their arrivals and departures, which initially causes Lucille and Ruthie to worry that she might abandon them like their other relatives have. She likes to stand on the tracks along the bridge near their town right after a train has passed by, feeling its vibrations under her feet. This makes her seem flighty and unreliable to most of Fingerbone, but she simply relishes the sort of liberation and potential for discovery trains represent. This links her spiritually with her father, who—as the story goes—had grown up in the plains and was so enraptured when he first read about mountains that he would spend the rest of his life painting mountain vistas, until his death in a freak train accident so improbable that it became part of the local folklore. Both Sylvie and her father—as well as, from what can be gathered, her late sister—were equally drawn to the charm of the railway strip, which ultimately put them at odds with the rest of Fingerbone.
Burchill and Walker also do great work here as the twin lenses through which we see the phenomenon of Sylvie. Upon first watch, one’s sympathies will instinctively (and fairly) gravitate towards Ruthie, whose passive disposition is often taken advantage of by her more assertive sister—not out of malice, but simply because they are teenagers and that’s how many teenagers are. However, I find myself after the fact thinking of Lucille, who wants so desperately to be ordinary that she eventually loses her sister and closest friend as a result. There is just as much tragedy in losing someone because you refuse to understand them as there is when they refuse to understand you.
The magic of both this film and Forsyth’s earlier (and also lovely) Local Hero is their shared belief that everyone has their reasons, and often, these reasons are well-intentioned but latently destructive nonetheless. Both films are gentle but pointed rebukes to the hypocrisies and inanities of modern life we often take as gospel, refusing to demonize any of its players but instead questioning deeply entrenched societal norms that don’t tolerate anyone existing outside of them. Where Local Hero is squarely a critique of unbridled 80s capitalism, Housekeeping has a more nebulous preoccupation with small-town conservatism, and how neighborly decency and concern can be quickly weaponized against what they cannot or will not understand. It’s difficult to see anyone in Fingerbone as being actively malicious, yet the emotional violence of how the town treats Sylvie (and later Ruthie) cannot be denied. Particularly in a Filipino context, it’s very relatable.
The most emotionally moving scene in Housekeeping is fortunately one of the few scenes from the movie that’s actually readily available online…sort of. The linked video is a blurry hand-cam of an already low-quality copy of the film being shown on a TV screen, capturing 46 seconds of a larger sequence that bridges the film’s penultimate and last acts: Ruthie and Aunt Sylvie lounging on a “borrowed” boat in the middle of the lake after an excursion to see an abandoned house in the mountains. In those 46 seconds, they sing the old folk song “Goodnight Irene”, a paean for a drifter’s homecoming. Being drifters at heart themselves at this point, the two of them achieve a simultaneous epiphany: Their home is not Fingerbone, but each other.
The last line of the narration goes: “Now, truly, we were cast out to wander, and there was an end to housekeeping”. But that need not mean the end of home. In a way, the material house and spiritual home are polar opposites in Housekeeping, in that the conflict stems from suppressing the latter in order to maintain the appearances of the former. Even the set design reflects this, as the house’s decay into clutter and mess coincides with the homely warmth Sylvie’s entrance brought into Ruthie’s life. The film, then, is an invitation to imagine home and human companionship in paradigms beyond those set by a conservative, materialistic society. It is an invitation to find beauty in things like the rumble of train tracks, the whispers of the forest, and the half-artifice of old stories: Things the rest of the world puts little stock in.
Like all the very best films, it invites you to jump into the unknown with it: Not with a push, but with the gentlest and most heart-shattering of nudges.
As implied earlier, I searched far and wide for a place where this might be streaming online, but no such luck, as its engagement with the Criterion Channel ended last January. It is, however, available through what I’ll call “alternative channels”. If you have some disposable income on your hands, you could also pony up a few pounds for Indicator’s robust Blu-ray release (plus shipping) here. It’s well worth the money.
Next week’s feature will be Gillian Armstrong’s delightful new-wave musical Starstruck, which is actually available in its entirety on Youtube! Yay for accessibility!