The House of Yes

Director: Mark Waters Mark Waters

Overview

A wealthy young man wants to wed a painfully ordinary girl, and a few hours with his family will convince anyone why he's doing so in this black comedy. Marty Pascal (Josh Hamilton) is engaged to marry Lesly (Tori Spelling), a dizzy blonde he met when she was working at a doughnut shop, and he bravely decides that it's time she met his family, so he brings her along for Thanksgiving dinner at his mother's house in West Virginia. Bravery is necessary because the Pascals are not an especially healthy or wholesome family. Mother (Genevieve Bujold) explains her philosophy about parenting like so: "You raise cattle; children just happen." In this environment, where refusing your child anything is all but unknown, her youngest son Anthony (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) has grown up to be an overanxious virgin eager to seduce Lesly while Marty's not paying attention. And Marty's twin sister Jackie (Parker Posey), malignily obsessed with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, often re-enacts the murder of JFK using spaghetti sauce for blood (when she can't get ahold of real bullets) and enjoys incestuously seducing Marty (which hardly bothers Mother, who notes that "Jackie's hand was holding Marty's penis when they came out the womb"). The House of Yes was based on the play by Wendy MacLeod; first time director Mark S. Waters (brother of screenwriter Daniel Waters) also adapted the screenplay.

Product Details

Release Date:	05/04/2021
UPC:	0810072541994
Original Release:	1997
Rating:	R
Source:	Miramax
Language:	English
Time:	1:25:00
Sales rank:	44,081

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Parker Posey	Jackie-O
Josh Hamilton	Marty
Tori Spelling	Lesly
Freddie Prinze Jr.	Anthony
Rachael Leigh Cook	Young Jackie-O
Geneviève Bujold	Mrs. Pascal
David Love	Young Marty
Rolfe Kent	Composer

Technical Credits

Mark Waters

Mark Waters	Director,Screenwriter
Robert 'Buzz' Berger	Executive Producer
Beau Flynn	Producer
Scott Silver	Executive Producer
Stefan Simchowitz	Producer
Mary Vernieu	Casting
Jed M. Dodge	Sound Editor
Robert W. Vandling	Sound Editor
Dan Monahan	Sound Mixer

Editorial Reviews

Although its arch banter occasionally falls flat and its claustrophobic production design leaves things a little bit stagebound, this adaptation of playwright Wendy MacLeod's The House of Yes works because of its richly layered script, its frequently hilarious dialogue, and its fine, if unexpected, casting decisions. In his feature debut, writer/director Mark S. Waters displays a deft hand with both brittle comedy and sharp psychological drama as he depicts the emotional and spiritual carnage of the decaying East Coast political gentry. Some audiences mistook the taboo-breaking plot as nothing more than indie titillation, but MacLeod's source material draws on the dramatic lineage of Noel Coward, Harold Pinter, Joe Orton, and Oscar Wilde -- not to mention The Rocky Horror Picture Show -- as it dissects an upper-crust dynasty's disaffection and permissiveness (check the title). The Pascal family belongs to the lower rungs of the Washington, D.C., social establishment, but its members proclaim their disdain for bourgeois values in deliciously tart aphorisms and epigrams. Indie darling Parker Posey plays the showiest role and therefore garnered the most critical attention, but it's actually Tori Spelling and Freddie Prinze Jr. whose performances prove the most surprising. Shrugging off their substance-free images, both young actors exercise subtlety and precision as their characters -- a wholesome "donut queen" and the kid brother of a pair of incestuous fraternal twins -- provide the vox populi to Posey and Genevieve Bujold's haughty entitlement. In a role that echoes Katharine Hepburn's in Suddenly Last Summer, Bujold is the epitome of regal wit and matriarchal ennui, but mention must be made of Josh Hamilton's equally dextrous prodigal son. The plot hinges on Marty's desire to escape his family's House of Usher-like degeneration, which makes it all the more wickedly pleasurable to watch him slide into old habits the minute he's exposed to the seductive familiarity of his twisted clan. Posey sometimes plays the spoiled, skewed Jackie-O a bit too broadly, but the minute Hamilton joins her onscreen, their characters start completing one another's sentences as only real-life twins (and lovers) truly could. In magnifying the maddeningly inextricable pull of the familial bond, House of Yes touches on truths more universal than its privileged setting might suggest.

All Movie Guide - Brian J. Dillard