I’ve wanted to write a little tribute to Stealing Home for a while. Stealing Home was a 1988 movie starring Mark Harmon and Jodie Foster as well as Harold Ramis, Jonathan Silverman, and William McNamara (a premier eighties that guy).
The premise of the movie is that down on his luck Billy Wyatt (Mark Harmon) has to scatter the ashes of his friend and first love Katie (Jodie Foster) after her suicide. He spends the movie trying to find the proper way to do that, all the while having flashbacks to his youth and young adulthood.
For me Stealing Home belongs in a special pantheon of movies that the indoor kids watched growing up. It was the movie that was on HBO at random times during the day and you watched a half hour of it here or a half hour of it there. I’m sure that I was drawn in to the movie one afternoon because I had to do homework, which made the second half of the movie that I happened to catch so engrossing. Then on another day, I caught the first half hour. Then on another day I caught the end.
Eventually, as I would with many movies, I would assemble the entire movie piecemeal and probably never see it from beginning to end.
So, I was going to write about Stealing Home. Then I thought, maybe I should check out how it was received when it came out. That’s when I saw Roger Ebert’s review of the movie where he gave it one star. He called it, “a movie so earnest and sincere and pathetic and dripping with pathos that it cries out to be satirized.”
I don’t know, maybe I was young?
But there are a few things that I know for sure. First, yes it is a cheesy movie but it was probably my first cheesy movie. It’s not a cliche when it’s the first time you see it.
Second, I loved both Jonathan Silverman and Harold Ramis, who played the character Appleby, young and old, respectively. Silverman throwing his golf clubs all over the golf course screaming, “You had Sex! With my prom date!” was funny. Then Harold Ramis telling Mark Harmon, “There is not a speck of lust left in my marriage,” then pausing, looking up at a painting above the bar where they’re drinking and saying, “would you look at the butt on this nymph?”
I’m sure that if I watched it again, I would be embarrassed by liking it but there’s one thing that I always thought was great about it and it’s Jodie Foster’s performance. The entire premise of the movie is that her character Katie has committed suicide. And I’ve admitted that the movie is cheesy. So, it’s ripe for an Oscar worthy break-down moment. But they never take the bait. Katie is shown throughout the movie as a little rebellious and maybe a little damaged and world weary but not suicidal. And yet there’s something about Foster’s performance that makes you believe it. It’s a subtle touch about the character (that you don’t see beyond her early twenties) that makes you believe she’s got some rough years ahead. I just thought it was impressive.
Watching movies the way that I watched Stealing Home will probably be a thing of the past shortly, if it isn’t already. And it was a movie that was very much of its time: full of saxophone solos while Mark Harmon ponders. But for whatever reason, I loved it growing up.
But I don’t recommend it. I guess it’s, like, really bad.
Saw the movie in the theater when it came out . There was only one other person in the place. Also watched it a number of times when it was on HBO when it came out on that channel. Haven’t thought much about in years until a friend of mine and his wife went to South Carolina to throw her parent’s ashes off a pier . His wife said “like in the movie years ago ” I answered “Stealing Home” “oh yes that one” was her replay . That movie always struck a note with me.
We LOVE the movie! It’s sad, happy, full of surprises as well as beautiful moments. It’s like LIFE.
Funny review of Stealing Home! I especially like how your review is essentially based on memories of piecemeal viewings many years ago. How fitting! Stealing Home is one of those tearjerkers that’s SO deliberately sentimental that it frustrates some viewers, like Roger Ebert, who demand sentimental movies earn their viewers tears through more sophisticated methods. Stealing Home has flaws, but I’m one of those people who easily forgives filmmakers for trying to make a deeply emotional movie earnestly, and this film has much going for it. The original music is written by David Foster, a master songwriter who wrote and performed the main song, And When She Danced with his then wife. The original score is beautiful, and it’s mixed in with bubblegum pop music from the late 50’s and early 60’s. The casting is very good, although I can’t bring myself to like Mark Harmon as much as I should. I look a lot like him, and our names are even nearly identical. Maybe that’s it? The film stars underrated actors like Blair Brown, Richard Jenkins, Harold Ramis and even a sweet cameo by Helen Hunt where she has nearly no lines. Foster is a great actor, and this was around the time of The Accused, a painful and powerful role that solidified Foster as a serious adult actor, and just 3 years before The Silence of the Lambs vaulted her into superstardom. She’s great in Stealing Home, and the filmmakers wisely left out her adult years, 14 of them from her mid 20’s to her early 40’s. Billy is 38 when she dies, and she’s his senior by 6 years. So she’s 44. That’s old enough to have experienced too much pain and disappointment, especially for a character defined by her free spirit and romantic dreams. The movie is dripping with sentimentality and nostalgia, but if you accept it for what it is, it’s a sweet film about the vital role people play in each other’s lives, and in finding their place in life.
It’s not THAT bad, and it captures that last golden era of WASP Mainline Philadelphia sumptuously. The big stone house, which had been in the family for years; the Jersey Shore beach houses; cheering the Phillies on from the rooftop radio; prep school baseball; the Volkswagon convertible Bug … all that attention to detail, perfectly captured and realized.