December 30, 2008: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
The National Lampoon is at least nominally the film world’s offshoot of the Harvard Lampoon magazine. The pedigree of the Harvard Lampoon is a whole story in itself, and some of its past editors are well-known in the comedy world, though largely behind the camera. The early National Lampoon films (Animal House, Class Reunion and Vacation) grew directly from an existing national expansion of the magazine franchise, though the more recent (and prolific) crop of titles from the past decade (Van Wilder, Barely Legal, Pledge This!) is little more than a name-licensing exercise. Either way, the brand is associated with goofy, broad comedies, and the Vacation series certainly qualifies.
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) is the third of four films in the “Vacation” series (Vacation from 1983, European Vacation from 1985, and Vegas Vacation from 1997 being the others). All of the movies are centred around the Griswold family, with the father Clark played by Saturday Night Live’s Chevy Chase and the mother played by Beverly D’Angelo, and each entry is about the disastrous results when this family tries to make a vacation or holiday time the best and most over-the-top it can possibly be. The children, Russ and Audrey, are of varying ages depending on how it suits the film’s plot, and they are played by different actors in each of the movies. In the case of Christmas Vacation, we find the family at home for once in the Chicago suburbs, planning to host the in-laws on both sides and have a happy family Christmas together despite the fact that not everyone gets along and Clark has a way of blowing everything out of proportion.
The story here is episodic, which is a suitable approach and lets the movie cover a longer period of time in the lead-up to Christmas, from getting the tree, to shopping at the mall, to outdoor winter fun in the snow, with a backdrop of the antics in the house day-to-day throughout December. Insert shots of the opening of doors on an advent calendar break up the episodes cleanly, at the same time conveniently keeping us up to date on the passage of time.
I first saw Christmas Vacation in the theatre, nearly 20 years ago now, and it’s been a popular viewing choice for me around Christmas time ever since. I don’t religiously (as it were) make sure that I see it every Christmas season, the way some people do with such films as It’s a Wonderful Life or the 1951 Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol, but we frequently get around to seeing it. On this particular occasion, my wife and son saw it with my in-laws while staying at their place after Christmas. It was the first viewing for the in-laws, and I think for my son as well.
The wider audience for this viewing framed the movie for me in a bit of a different light than that in which I usually see it. There’s plenty of slapstick comedy and the whole story is generally light-hearted and funny, but for a movie which on the surface seems to be positioning itself as a family classic, it seems to be unnecessarily coarse. There’s a decent amount of swearing (including of course exactly one well-placed “f” word, since it’s rated PG-13) but the swearing mostly doesn’t add comedic value. Clark’s rants, while certainly a staple of the series, seem more bitter and angry here, whereas in the past they were more a venting of extreme frustration. And there’s a minor thread through the movie concerning Clark’s fantasies about a saleswoman he encounters at the mall, which lends an uncomfortable and completely unnecessary air of sexual innuendo to the picture, not to mention some gratuitous near-nudity. Not that I have any problem with these elements of the movie, mind you, and not that I’ve ever particularly noticed before, but it really highlighted for me on this viewing that the movie doesn’t quite know what it wants to be, and both potential audiences (the family vs. the raunchy comedy viewers) are compromised as a result. As I reflect on this, I suppose it’s an inevitable result of trying to tone down what was up to this point an unabashedly R-rated franchise, in a world which by that time offered the mixed blessing of the PG-13 rating. The previous Vacation films had strong language throughout and a sprinkling of nudity in the tradition of the earlier National Lampoon entries, but weren’t really “hard-R” pictures, so minor toning down must have made sense and probably did substantially grow the teen audience.
Chevy Chase was a fixture of 1980s comedies, and this was one of his real successes. His output in the past 2 decades has been very weak. The Vacation series plays perfectly to his strengths, but an essential element to their success is Beverly D’Angelo, who is much more of a real actress (not to mention a singer – I’m long overdue to revisit Coal Miner’s Daughter in which she plays Patsy Cline opposite Sissy Spacek’s Loretta Lynn) and elevates all of the Vacation movies with her presence. In this film, we also have a very young Juliette Lewis playing the daughter Audrey, Randy Quaid returning with his memorable cousin Eddie character, and E.G. Marshall, Diane Ladd and Doris Roberts among the in-laws, and this strong supporting cast helps to make the relationships believable on top of the framework of idiocy. With a script by John Hughes (the 1980s auteur who brought us The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off among other things, and went on to write the Home Alone films and assorted other children’s fare), it’s no surprise that Christmas Vacation was a success.
Post a Comment