Why ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’ is the ultimate Thanksgiving movie – and how John Hughes turned a buddy comedy into a Turkey Day classic.
Rolling Stone | Jason Diamond
Thanksgiving is all about the buildup.
You wait for it, that long weekend that you know will include family, maybe some football, plenty of food, and then leftovers and sales the day after that. Everything looks great in those weeks leading up to the fourth Thursday in November, until it all goes to hell, with that long drive probably filled with holiday traffic and the drunk relatives whose opinions you really don’t care to hear about. The anticipation of the holiday is fun. The drama that ensues during it is not.
That’s one of the many brilliant things about 1987’s Planes, Trains and Automobiles, the last truly great movie that John Hughes took on the triple job of writer, producer and director before slowly fading into the background, eventually all but vanishing from public view until his death in 2009. The buildup to the holiday weekend that Steve Martin’s Neal Page experiences as he tries to make it home from New York City to Chicago looks about as enjoyable as Dante’s exploration of the Inferno. And if we’re using that classic poem as an analogy, Del Griffith, played masterfully by John Candy, makes a horrible Virgil on the duo’s hellish journey back to the windy city.
Of course, this all equals comedic gold for viewers. Martin and Candy together is really the kind of pairing people dream of. The former, a few years completely removed from his standup days, was starting to inch away from zanier works like The Jerk and The Three Amigos and move closer towards his more family-friendly fare of the 1990s. For the latter, it was the start of a fruitful working relationship with Hughes, one that would see the SCTV alum go on to star in The Great Outdoors (1988), Uncle Buck (1989) and a small role in Home Alone (1990).
And for Hughes, it was the beginning of a new phase in his own career as well. Planes, Trains and Automobiles was his first attempt to make films aimed more at adults and kids, moving away from the teen movies that helped him make his mark in Hollywood. The Great Outdoors and Uncle Buck were both successful at the box office (though 1988’s She’s Having a Baby was a critical and commercial letdown), and the director would close out the decade by successfully revisiting the Griswolds, a family based off the short stories he wrote for National Lampoon in the late 1970s. Christmas Vaction was the first time Hughes would use the holiday as inspiration for his work; he’d return to December 25th as the basis for the first two Home Alone films, as well as the somewhat underrated (and way darker than you might remember) remake of Miracle on 34th Street. But while Planes didn’t bring in the same overflowing bags of box-office loot as the saga of Macaulay Culkin torturing two idiot burglars, it did end up as something else: a Thanksgiving classic.
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Editorial note: Both copies of PTA are checked out of the Barrington Area Library, but Best Buy in Deer Park has two (2) on the shelf for $5.99.
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