Families in Transition : AMC’s ‘Homeward Bound’ looks to the movies for social reflection

“Homeward Bound,” American Movie Classics’ latest original documentary, offers a sociological and historical spin on how Hollywood has portrayed the American family throughout the decades.

“You couldn’t have done this documentary 20 years ago because the family was one thing in the ‘40s, and completely fell apart in the ‘60s and the ‘70s,” says producer, director and co-creator Linda Shaffer. “Then, you see the cycle come back in the ‘80s. The family has sort of redefined itself.”

“Homeward Bound” features directors and actors Ellen Burstyn (“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any more”), Ron Howard (“Parenthood”), Robert Benton (“Kramer vs. Kramer”), Barry Levinson (“Avalon”), Paul Mazursky (“Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” “An Unmarried Woman”) and Elizabeth McGovern (“Ordinary People”) discussing how the values and traditions of the American family have changed through the decades. The documentary shows how those changes are reflected through Hollywood’s movies, chronologically including: “Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever” (1939), “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940), “Since You Went Away” (1944), “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1945), “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946), “Father of the Bride” (1950), “East of Eden” (1955), “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955), “A Raisin in the Sun (1961), “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), “The Graduate” (1967), “ Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” (1969), “Kramer Vs. Kramer” (1979), “Ordinary People (1980), “Baby Boom” (1987), “Parenthood” (1989), “Avalon” (1990) and “Menace II Society” (1993).

Also featured in “Homeward Bound” is Stephanie Coontz, a professor of family and social history at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., who believes contemporary TV and features are much more realistic in portraying the diversity of families. Still, she adds, families still buy into a lot of “myths when they discuss how families have changed. For example, what we now think of as a ‘traditional family’--the male breadwinner, the female homemaker and the kids at school--only in the 1920s did a bare majority of children come to live in that kind of family. A lot of other peoples’ lives were being ignored.”

Coontz adds that the “perfect” family has remained an ideal for the 1990s. “I think in the end of the 1980s, some of that celebration of family that comes across in the documentary as all positive was also tinged with a re-creation of some myths,” she says. “The movie I think of is ‘Fatal Attraction,’ where the good girl is the woman who stays home. It’s so powerful a message against a high-powered female.”

When she looks at the evolution of the family in movies, Coontz sees a loss of a sense of community in America. “I think there’s a tendency to substitute family for that.”

One of the first films to illustrate the loss of community, Coontz says, is the 1955 film “Marty.” “The conflict there is between loyalty to kin group and neighborhood, and it gets settled in favor of the nuclear family.”

That wasn’t the case with such ‘40’s classics as “The Grapes of Wrath” and “The Best Years of Our Lives.” In those films, Coontz explains, the family is a microcosm of social forces. “The mother in ‘Grapes of Wrath’ is not saying, ‘I will be an even better mother.’ She is standing for the resistance of an entire community. And in ‘Best Years of Our Lives,’ those are not just individual problems but real problems of coming back to a world that has changed. Unlike the ‘30s and ‘40s, all too often the family in modern film treatments doesn’t become a way of lining up with others, a base in which to make connections. It becomes a personal oasis or a substitute for other connections.”

In fact, Coontz says she hasn’t seen any movie that “really confronts the complexity of family life with the trade-off that some things are a real step forward, and some things pose new problems and you can’t escape them by taking your baby, moving to the country and starting your own business, like in ‘Baby Boom.’ ”

Coontz said she believes ABC’s long-running sitcom “Roseanne” “comes closest to showing a real family with all its dysfunctions and its incredible love and connections that go beyond (the family). I think TV is a little bit ahead there.”

“Homeward Bound” airs Tuesday at 6 and 9 p.m. on AMC.