Planes, Trains and Automobiles Is Worse Than You Think. Neal Was Right

Planes, Trains and Automobiles opened Nov. 25, 1987, and has since become the closest thing Thanksgiving has to a liturgy. It holds a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert put it in his Great Movies collection. Families watch it the way their grandparents said grace, out of habit, and with one eye on the potatoes. I'm about to say some unkind things about it, and I'd ask you to hear me out before you throw the gravy boat.

The setup is famous. Steve Martin plays Neal Page, an uptight ad executive trying to get from New York to Chicago two days before Thanksgiving. John Candy plays Del Griffith, a shower curtain ring salesman who talks the way a faucet drips. A blizzard strands them, and they spend the next 90-odd minutes being thrown out of planes, trains, a motel bed and, eventually, a car that Del sets on fire with a cigarette. John Hughes wrote, directed and produced it, on a budget of $15 million, and it made about $49.5 million. Respectable. Not a phenomenon, whatever your uncle tells you.

Here's the problem. The whole engine of the movie is that Neal is a snob and Del is a saint, and that Neal must learn to love the man who has ruined his life. But watch it again with a clear head. Del takes the cab Neal paid for. Del's luggage spills all over the motel. Del drives the wrong way down a highway and burns up the rental car. Neal, the villain, wants to go home to his wife. If a stranger did half of this to you in real life, you wouldn't learn a lesson. You'd call a lawyer, and the lawyer would take the case for free.

The film knows this, which is why it saves the twist for the end: Del has no home, and his wife died eight years earlier. It's a fine scene, and Candy plays it beautifully. But it's also a card the movie holds face down for an hour and a half so it can scold you for laughing at the guy it spent an hour and a half asking you to laugh at. That's not heart. That's a magician sawing a woman in half and then lecturing the audience on violence.

Then there's the celebrated rental-counter scene, where Martin drops the F-word, by the AFI's count, 19 times in one go. It's a great tantrum. It also got the film an R rating that Paramount appealed and lost, the first Hughes-directed movie to get one, and it's the reason families who watch this every year spend three minutes of it shouting over the television so Grandma won't hear. Hughes's first cut reportedly ran close to four hours, so somebody showed restraint somewhere. Not there.

None of this makes it a bad movie. Martin and Candy are wonderful, and the bit where they wake up in the motel is as good as screen comedy gets. But it's a story about a decent man who's right about everything, being told he's wrong by a film that needs him to be. Every Thanksgiving we sit our families down to watch it, and every Thanksgiving there's a Del at the table. Nobody ever learns to love him. They just pass him the rolls and count the hours, which is the real American tradition.