Time to talk about something more seasonal now—well this one is ostensibly a Thanksgiving movie, but not being American I don’t know much about that holiday besides it involving sacrifices to a turkey god or something, and today’s subject works just as well if we pretend it’s for the Christmas period. With that in mind, let’s talk Planes, Trains, and Automobiles!
Our premise from director John Hughes is straightforward—rising star of the 80s US comedy circuit Steve Martin plays a New York ad executive who has one simple task—make it back to his family in Chicago in time for the holidays. On the plane there he meets a chatty if somewhat overbearing fellow played by John Candy, and while in any normal situation one might assume that would be that…turns out everything that can go wrong on this trip will. With the flight stranded by snowstorms, and with the pair soon thereafter being robbed in shady motels, any means of transportation becomes fair game as fate conspires to keep the two together—no matter the sadism of Murphy’s Law.
What makes the movie work is twofold—first of all, while things get played to absurdity…let’s face it, we’ve all had this kind of travel catastrophe at least once. Maybe you’ve had the wrong train tickets sold, or maybe cancellations and chaos have turned a straightforward trip into a mind-shattering rigmarole that just left you going halfway around the world just to get in a straight line while being shoved into someone’s armpit…ahem. Or maybe you simply took the wrong airline or train company where the food was so bad you’d swear it it was a deliberate ploy to test whether a merciful God does in fact exist.
Point is, it’s that kind of everyday nonsense that we can all relate to—it’s played for laughs, but every instance of misfortune encountered by our leads is something we can imagine happening all too well, and that relatability is something that keeps us invested (along with maybe some morbid curiosity to see what happens next!).
The second key element is the chemistry between our leads—at first it seems like another buddy comedy between the stuckup and the big fun, but there’s a little more to it than that. Martin here is more a fairly standard guy who’s simply having a lot of bad luck and is understandable high strung as a result—we’ve all been there. Candy seems like the more easygoing type, but there seems to be something else going on there—and there is of course something near the end that brings a whole new aspect to all we’ve seen of his character. It’s in fact just the sort of thing that suits a story for the holidays.
And indeed, isn’t the film just a great metaphor for that—a flurry of stress, a cavalcade of all the nonsense of the modern age, running this way and that…for a much more fleeting bliss, but when you finally get there, with a bit of luck, there’s just the right note of payoff.
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