Home Alone

The story

Full story — spoilers ahead.

The McCallisters are a huge, loud family packing for Paris at Christmas. The house is full of cousins, suitcases, and arguments about who stole whose plane ticket. Kevin is eight, the youngest of the American kids, and he is in everyone’s way. After a fight over cheese pizza and a ruined family portrait, he tells his mother he wishes they would all disappear.

In the rush the next morning they count the children wrong. A neighbor’s child gets in the van. Kevin is left asleep in the attic. The plane takes off. He wakes up in an empty house and, for a few hours, treats it as a miracle.

The first day is a fantasy. He jumps on his parents’ bed, eats ice cream for breakfast, watches an old gangster film, and talks back to the furnace. He is still scared of the basement and of Old Man Marley, the neighbor everyone says is a murderer. He is also proud of himself. For the first time in his life, nobody is telling him he is too little.

Then he hears two burglars in the street. Harry and Marv, the “Wet Bandits,” have been hitting empty houses in the neighborhood. They pick his. Kevin overhears the plan and decides the house is a fort. He is not a soldier. He is a child who has seen too many movies and has a whole hardware drawer to himself.

He rigs the stairs, the front door, the tree house, the basement, and the blowtorch. He uses paint cans, micro machines, a tarantula, and a heated doorknob. When Harry and Marv finally come in, the siege is slapstick and painful. They keep coming back because they cannot stand being beaten by a kid.

While that is happening, his mother Kate is trying to get home from Europe. She argues with strangers, takes any flight she can, and finally rides across the Midwest with a polka band. The rest of the family is stuck in a Paris hotel realizing, too late, what they have done. The comedy is Kevin’s. The ache is hers. She is the one who said they could leave without him if he kept acting like this. She did not mean it.

Kevin also grows up a little when nobody is watching. He shops, does laundry, and talks to Marley in a church. Marley is not a killer. He is a lonely grandfather who is afraid to call his son. Kevin, who started the week wishing his family away, tells an old man to make the call. That scene is the film’s heart. The traps are the plot. The conversation is the reason the plot matters.

The burglars catch him in the end, and Marley is the one who saves him. The police take Harry and Marv. Kate reaches the house in the dark, calling Kevin’s name through rooms that are suddenly too quiet. He is there. Christmas morning brings the family back, louder than before, and Kevin lets them in.

He also lets Marley in, from a distance, watching him greet the family he was afraid to face. The movie is about a child who wanted to be left alone and then learned what alone actually costs. The wish comes true. The wish is awful. The last morning is ordinary on purpose.