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Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael
R2 - United Kingdom - Network Review written by and copyright: Paul Lewis (30th April 2010). |
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The Film
 Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (Jim Abrahams, 1990) 
A frothy, lightweight and charming comedy-drama about small town life in America, Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990) was an odd change of pace for its director, Jim Abrahams, who until that point was associated with the vulgar satire of The Kentucky Fried Movie (John Landis, 1977) (which Abrahams co-wrote with Jerry Zucker), genre parodies such as Airplane! (Abrahams, David & Jerry Zucker, 1980) and Top Secret (Abrahams, David & Jerry Zucker, 1984), and the farcical comedies Ruthless People (Abrahams, David & Jerry Zucker, 1986) and Big Business (Abrahams, 1988). By contrast, Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael offers a more subtle examination of small town American life and disaffected youth, with little of the vulgar, scatological humour of Abrahams’ earlier work. The sole crude visual gag – which takes place in a tailor’s shop, in which one character sees the shop assistant hemming Denton Webb’s (Jeff Daniels) trousers and mistakenly believes the shop assistant to be performing oral sex on Webb – seems dramatically out of place with the rest of the film, although it is arguably the sequence that has the most in common with Abrahams’ other work. Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael takes place in a small town called Clyde. A prologue establishes that, fifteen years prior to the main narrative, a young Denton Webb (Jeff Daniels) had a relationship with Roxy Carmichael (Ava Fabian). Webb and Carmichael have a baby, but Roxy is uninterested in settling down: ‘Places. I’m going places’, she tells Webb. Roxy dismisses the baby they have had together, abandoning it and telling Webb to ‘Take it to somebody who knows about this… stuff’. 
Fifteen years later, the town of Clyde, Ohio, is preparing for the return of Roxy Carmichael, who has in the intervening years become something of a celebrity. Roxy is visiting Clyde to open the Roxy Carmichael Center for Cosmetology and Drama. In honour of Roxy’s scheduled visit to the town, the mayor (Stephen Tobolowsky) has declared the celebration of ‘Roxy Carmichael Week’. The townsfolk are excited about the return of Clyde’s ‘prodigal daughter’ (as a sign outside the local church refers to Roxy) and much of the talk within the community revolves around Roxy’s activities, with the women in the hairdresser’s heatedly discussing ‘what Roxy would do’. The film introduces us to Dinky Bossetti (Winona Ryder), an adolescent misfit who is bullied by the other students at her school and who spends much of her spare time tending to abandoned animals who she seems to use as substitutes for the friends that she doesn’t have. ‘She won’t be around for long’, one of the other local kids asserts in relation to Dinky. 
Dinky has a thorny relationship with her adopted parents, Rochelle and Les Bossetti (Frances Fisher & Graham Beckel). (‘I caught her [Dinky] trying to barb wire her room’, Rochelle tells Lee over breakfast.) Unsatisfied by her home life, Dinky begins to believe that Roxy is her real mother. Roxy’s childhood home has been turned into a tourist attraction to match Elvis Presley’s Graceland ('we have simulated life just as it was when Roxy lived here', a tour guide notes), and in an attempt to connect with the woman she believes to be her mother Dinky visits the house, locking herself in Roxy’s childhood bedroom until the owner calls the police to dispel Dinky from the house. Meanwhile, Webb has matured into a family man, and lives with his wife Barbara (Joan McMurtrey) and their two children. As the narrative progresses, Webb becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea that Roxy is returning for him, to recapture the romantic relationship they shared as adolescents. This leads to arguments between Webb and Barbara, and eventually Barbara leaves Webb, taking their two children with her. 
As the return of Roxy Carmichael draws closer, Dinky develops a strong bond with her guidance counselor, Beth Zaks (Laila Robins), and begins a halting relationship with a boy at school, Gerald Howells (Thomas Wilson Brown). However, Dinky believes that Roxy is returning to rescue her from her small town life, and in anticipation of this Dinky makes plans to say farewell to the town. The film is structured around the absence of Roxy Carmichael. Both Webb and Dinky put their lives on hold in anticipation of Roxy’s return, both of them believing that Roxy is coming back to Clyde to rescue them. Webb’s wife Barbara has the most sensible attitude, telling Webb bluntly that 'She [Roxy] never loved you [….] She won't even so much say hello to you on Friday, because she won't even know who you are'. Later, in a more direct critique of our relationship with celebrity, Gerald reminds Dinky, 'Who the hell's Roxy Carmichael? [….] There are real people, right here in your life, who care'. 
Roxy herself is an enigma. She is famous, but when Dinky asks ‘What’s she famous for?’, no-one replies. Later, Dinky has a conversation with Webb, and Webb tells Dinky that Roxy is famous solely because a rock musician wrote a song about her. A flabbergasted Dinky responds by asserting, 'She was in a song? That's why she's so famous? I mean, she didn't save a country, invent something great or murder someone?' Elsewhere, the townspeople praise Roxy as ‘a great businesswoman’ in one breath, and in another they tell tales of how promiscuous and dishonest she was, and depict her as a sex object ('She had the greatest thighs I've ever seen', one of her former classmates declares). Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael offers an affectionate satire of small town life and the desire to escape from it, and provides a gentle deconstruction of the notion of celebrity as a means of escape from the doldrums of everyday life. (Roxy’s ‘famous for being famous’ status is arguably even more pertinent in today’s age of reality television stars.) Within this context, it’s fitting that Roxy never actually returns to Clyde, instead sending an emissary to thank the townsfolk for their celebration of her fame. Winona Ryder offers a warm performance as Dinky, a tomboy who aggravates her adoptive parents because she ‘prefer[s] books to dolls [and] boots to ballet slippers’, and who causes an argument with Rochelle because she dyes her new yellow jumper black. Dinky challenges the submissive female role she has been given, offering an example of youth culture’s ‘resistance through ritual’. (At one point, Rochelle tells her hairdresser, Charmaine, that ‘I feel like we adopted a baby from Mars or something: she is not like us at all [….] I wanted to give Dinky everything I never had; she was going to be our little doll, but she never wanted any of that’.) Dinky’s attempts to feminise herself, in order to impress Gerald, suggest a reactionary subtext about women’s roles but are effective because of Ryder’s sensitive and mature performance. 
In its focus on disaffected youth, Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael is allied with the cycle of ‘coming of age’ films that became popular in the 1980s and early 1990s, and which acted as a showcase for the emerging ‘Brat Pack’ actors, from The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985) and the comic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (John Hughes, 1986) to the dark River’s Edge (Tim Hunter, 1986). By the time of the production of Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, Winona Ryder had already made a strong appearance in the blackly comic youth picture Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1988), but Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael differs from the majority of the 1980s/1990s coming of age pictures for its focus on a female protagonist. Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael is an interesting but uneven film: its satirical take on celebrity and small town life is arguably undermined somewhat by its twee resolution, and with a fairly wide cast of characters the narrative is a little unfocused at times. Ultimately, the film has little of the ‘bite’ of, say, Heathers. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting entry into the coming of age films of the 1980s and 1990s. The film runs for 91:44 mins (PAL) and is uncut.
Video
The film is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1, with anamorphic enhancement. The transfer is excellent: colours are strong and solid, and contrast levels are consistent. 
Audio
Audio is presented via a two-channel stereo track. This is clear and consistent. There are no subtitles.
Extras
The sole extra is an Image Gallery (2:19).
Overall
Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael is, as noted above, a frothy and lightweight film; it offers a warm look at small town life, and its satirical skewering of celebrity is effective. Ryder is very good in the lead role, and Jeff Daniels gives a strong performance too. However, the film is a little unfocused and the resolution is perhaps a little too twee and sentimental, and for this reason Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael is ultimately, as stated above, a step below a similar film such as Heathers. This DVD contains an excellent presentation of the film. For more information, please visit the homepage of Network DVD.
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