Stephen M. Klugewicz
A lighthearted romp at first blush, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” yet tells the story of how the example of simple goodness can be transformational.
The category of “Thanksgiving movies” is a select one indeed, but it is not meant as faint praise to crown John Hughes’ 1987 film, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, the greatest Thanksgiving film ever made. On the surface a carefree comedy, the movie carries a subtle Christian subtext and a message whose deep pathos is not fully revealed until its penultimate scene.
The movie tells the story of Neal Page (played by Steve Martin), a middle-aged, well-to-do advertising executive, who is trying to get home from New York to spend Thanksgiving with his family at his home in an up-scale Chicago suburb. His journey quickly becomes a nightmare when he meets Del Griffith (played by John Candy) a boorish, traveling shower-curtain-ring salesman, who attempts to befriend the self-centered Page. Griffith first inadvertently steals Page’s taxi, then ends up seated next to him on a plane that is grounded by a snowstorm, and next proceeds to bumble in nearly every attempt to help Page get home by, variously, train, truck, and automobile.
The interplay between the staid and trim Martin and the gregarious and rotund Candy makes for some hilarious and unforgettable scenes: Page and Griffith are forced to share a hotel bed together and wake up to find that they are cuddling in their sleep, dreaming of their wives (“Those aren’t pillows!”); Griffith mistakenly drives the wrong way down a highway, dismissing two motorists’ shouted warning that they “are going the wrong way” with the retort, “how do they know where we’re going?”; Griffith’s carelessness results in the pair’s rental car going up in flames, yet Griffith is nonplussed and pilots the skeletal vehicle down the interstate, telling a police officer who stops them that he indeed deems the car “safe for highway travel.”
But beneath all the hijinks lurk the messages of charity and redemption. » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/11/thanksgiving-tale-redemption-planes-trains-and-automobiles-timeless-stephen-klugewicz.html