Home Alone at 30: how the unlikely Christmas comedy has endured | Film

To the news of Disney’s plans to produce a remake of holiday classic Home Alone, director of the genuine article Chris Columbus had words sharper than a toy car on a bare foot. “It’s a waste of time, as far as I’m concerned,” Columbus said in a recent interview with Insider commemorating the 30th anniversary of the film’s release. “What’s the point? I’m a firm believer that you don’t remake films that have had the longevity of Home Alone. You’re not going to create lightning in a bottle again. It’s just not going to happen.”

Setting aside the fact that he himself tried to rebottle that lightning by stranding Macaulay Culkin’s pint-size protector Kevin McCallister in New York for a sequel, Columbus is right. On paper, the $476m box-office bonanza shouldn’t have been anything special. The premise isn’t much more complex than a kid’s parents leaving for Christmas vacation without him, noticing that they have forgotten him, and then going home. And though everyone loves the hyper-violent hi-jinks, the script saves the main event for the final 30 minutes, hanging with young Kevin for about an hour before he must fend off the attacks of robbers Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. The following decades proved Columbus to be no great shakes as a film artist, either, his more noteworthy accomplishments limited to Mrs Doubtfire and the two weakest Harry Potter films. In a different time and place, with different personnel, with a slight difference in the blowing of the wind, it would’ve made the same impact as any other lightweight Yuletide confection.

Still, there’s something warmly indelible about Kevin’s inadvertent staycation, a feeling owed to the fortuitous collaboration between 10-year-old star Culkin and screenwriter John Hughes. The maestro of the 80s teen movie dreamt up the concept for the script with all the imagination of Jerry Seinfeld doing a tight five on air travel. “I was going away on vacation, and making a list of everything I didn’t want to forget,” he explained in an interview with Time. “I thought, ‘Well, I’d better not forget my kids.’ Then I thought, ‘What if I left my 10-year-old son at home? What would he do?’” In the hands of the usual hacks running today’s kiddie cinema, this could’ve been a cutesy look at one hooligan living large without supervision, but Hughes has always shone brightest by shrinking the distance between being a child and grown-up.

His high-schooler creations got caught between their last gasps of youth and the earliest perilous brushes with adulthood, a tension back-shifted here to Kevin’s age bracket. Like Ferris Bueller before him, Kevin takes the lack of oversight as a chance to enjoy the finer things that the rest of the world says he’s not old enough for. Without Mom and Dad around to cramp his style, he gets the classically Hughesian first taste of sexuality, except that young Kevin reacts with prepubescent disgust at the centerfold in his big brother’s forbidden Playboy mags. His is a juvenile impression of maturity, savvy enough to know that homeowners have wine glasses with dinner and boyish enough to fill his to the brim…