Plot
Stewart McBain (Coleman) is a successful self-made demolitions expert who blows up buildings for a living. In the midst of one such project, a group of protesters stops the last building on a lot, the Dutch House, from being demolished. When McBain appears on TV to dismiss the protests, he is made to look foolish. Returning home, his three college-aged children - Daphne (Thurman), Chloe (Amis), and Jimmy (Hewlett) - ridicule him for appearing on camera.
Feeling his children are spoiled and soft, McBain kicks them out of the house. Giving them each $750, he drops them off at the Dutch House to live. The house is dilapidated and on the verge of collapse. In order to finance their new lives, the children take on housemates. These include a fashion designer (Glover) named Lionel; a homeless magician, Shitty (Plummer); a stockbroker, Tom (Walsh); and Sheryl, an amateur occultist (Kelley). Chloe is commissioned to finish a calendar for an insurance company. Lionel has to complete his designs for a fashion show. Chloe uses her roommates in the calendar and Lionel ends up using some of them to model for his show.
The story is told against the backdrop of a stockmarket crash which brings McBain to ruin. He desperately attempts to stave off a hostile takeover of his demolition company and fails. He loses his home and becomes destitute. Ultimately, his children take him in and he starts to see the world in an entirely different light.
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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