December 7, 2009: Planes, Trains & Automobiles
The late John Hughes is indelibly associated with movies examining teen angst in the 1980s, and for good reason. He had that genre locked up. On occasion he came up with a little something about adults as well, and while Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987) revels in its R-rating, aside from some mature themes and coarse language and stories about the boring things grownups do, there’s really nothing to make this one inappropriate for teenagers.
Planes, Trains & Automobiles depicts the multi-day struggle of a Chicago businessman to get home to his family for Thanksgiving. He repeatedly encounters a particularly annoying fellow traveller and they end up alternately teaming up and going their separate ways a number of times over the space of a few days as they struggle to return home during one of the busiest holiday travel times of the year. Steve Martin plays the strait-laced businessman who just wants some peace and quiet while he makes his way home, and John Candy is the loud, boorish salesman who keeps popping up and always seems to be making things worse. We are taken through numerous scenarios involving the titular vehicles, with an inordinate number of breakdowns and exactly the amount of rental and clerical difficulty that you would expect from harried employees overworked in the face of a storm system on a big holiday.
I used to travel a fair bit for work in the late 1990s, and it seriously doesn’t even compare to what travellers a decade earlier had to deal with. I could land in a foreign country, grab some local cash from the ATM in the airport, buy a snack and then pick up my pre-arranged rental car which I had arranged over the phone (and even that seems ridiculous compared to today when it’s a no-brainer to reserve a car online). If I needed to get in touch with someone, I could just pull out my cellphone. The guys in this movie are running out of cash and struggling with just a few credit cards, they need to line up for payphones and hope they have enough change, and they can’t seem to make any headway even when they are tantalizingly close to home. The pitfalls they deal with are more on the scale of today’s traveller losing his/her wallet and cellphone at the same time.
I’ve long thought of this as one of the great 1980s comedies, and I was a bit disappointed as I revisited it on this occasion for admittedly the first time in several years. Steve Martin’s character is surprisingly harsh and mean, which doesn’t quite ring true and seems out of place in a light comedy. The movie is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, not crackling along at a mile a minute the way I remember it, although to be fair there are a good number of endlessly quotable lines (those aren’t pillows!). I’d still have to recommend this as part of the comedy canon for that decade, but I don’t think I would put it near the top of the list for someone who isn’t already a fan of the genre and the decade.
1980s comedy holds up and disappoints.
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