Home is Where the Heart Is
It has been an incredibly long time since Amanda (Lisa Brenner - The Patriot) saw her grandmother and her impressive island home in Maine. And most of the time her memories from back then consist of her mum stopping her from even phoning her grandmother and also a drama involving a knife and a local boy. But on her birthday Amanda receives the bad news from her grandmother's friend, Katie (Geneviève Bujold - Tightrope), that her grandmother has passed away and the funeral will be in two days. Dropping everything at her job as an executive in the city Amanda returns for her grandmother's funeral only to discover she has inherited the home on the island. With her life in the city, Amanda plans to sell the place but returning there she finds herself not only examining what she really wants in life but going through her grandmother's belongings and getting to see what really happened all those years ago.
I will get straight to the point and say that "Finding Home" reminded me of more than a half a dozen made for TV movies where the estranged city girl, in this case a granddaughter, inherits an old family home and not only finds herself questioning where her life is going but also finds herself trying to solve an old family mystery. What this means is that "Finding Home" whilst partially about the mystery is also aiming to be warm and touching. But there is a difference between "Finding Home" and say the typical Hallmark Channel equivalent as this movie comes in at 124 minutes and frankly is incredibly slow going to the point that during the first hour it borders on the lethargic.
But beyond that lethargic nature "Finding Home" gives us this mystery which is in fact a double mystery as on one front we have Amanda reading her grandmother's old journals and reading about her true love. And on the other front we have the mystery surrounding what happened when Amanda was young which led to her having memories involving a young man who still lives on the island but also led to her mother taking her away and preventing her from getting in touch with her grand mother and vice versa. The mysteries are okay and give the movie that warm, touching side and also takes in the wonderful views of the location they picked but again it is also quite slow going.
What this all boils down to is that "Finding Home" is similar to many a made for TV movie with the exception that at 124 minutes it feels drawn out to the point that it gets a bit too slow.
