Mark Waters’s The House of Yes is, appropriately, artificial. Crisply stylized dialogue and arch, consciously broad performances constantly emphasize the point: this is all pretend.
The movie is clear about that from the start. We open with a series of alternating shots: news footage of Jackie Kennedy giving a tour of the White House, then home video footage of a teenage Jackie-O Pascal (Rachael Leigh Cook in flashbacks; Parker Posey as an adult) imitating her, showing off her own stately home. Her voiceover tells us about an Ides of March party she and her twin brother, Marty (Josh Hamilton), once attended. Her very realistic Jackie Kennedy costume, featuring not only the pink Chanel suit and pillbox hat but also fake blood and brain matter, did not meet with mass acclaim.
Years later, Jackie-O still can’t read a room. She’s bright and brittle and fragile, fresh off a stay in a psychiatric hospital, her hands sporting third-degree burns from a breakdown over flat seltzer water. She’s as off-putting as she is electric and as sad as she is monstrous, and today–Thanksgiving–she’s more keyed up than ever. Marty is coming home for the first time in … well, for the first time since Jackie shot him to try to stop him from leaving her. Let’s just say that their relationship has always been intense.
Whatever tenuous sense of self-control Jackie has shatters when Marty brings home Lesly (Tori Spelling), a working-class doughnut shop waitress who is as sweet and sincere as his upper-crust family is acidic and artificial. Meet Lesly, Marty says, and oh, by the way, we’re engaged. Jackie-O is viciously, poisonously, painfully jealous. Awkward little brother Anthony (Freddie Prinze Jr.) is wistfully jealous, and in a different direction–one that, as uncomfortable as it would make any normal family gathering, feels almost refreshingly normal here. Mrs. Pascal (Geneviève Bujold) just wants Lesly out of her house as soon as possible, before she can wreck what small steps Jackie-O has made towards recovery. There’s a hurricane outside and a furor of exaggerated, darkly comedic interpersonal drama inside.
The House of Yes is intermittently quite funny, especially when Posey really lets loose on Jackie-O’s bright-eyed and desperate malice, and as a cruel comedy of manners, it works quite well. But it deepens and darkens as it goes on, gradually revealing the raw and often ugly truths that the characters’ artifice are meant to conceal–and a deep chasm in the understanding between Jackie-O and Marty, even when it comes to their shared obsession. It’s heightened, absurd, and rich, with a lot of genuine thought and feeling beneath all the sparkle and provocation. You can’t lose yourself in it–whatever this is, it’s the opposite of immersive–but that doesn’t mean that what you find isn’t worthwhile. And as a bonus, it’s the perfect Thanksgiving viewing for families who wish their gatherings were just a little more awkward.
The House of Yes is streaming on the Criterion Channel.