30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays

The story is familiar. Steve Martin plays Neal, a Chicago advertising man, sleek in impeccable blues and grays, smooth-shaven, recently barbered, reeking of self-confidence, prosperity, and anal-retentiveness. John Candy plays Del, a traveling salesman from Chicago who sells shower curtain rings (“the best in the world”). He is very tall, very large, and covered in layers of mismatched shirts, sweaters, vests, sport coats, and parkas. His bristly little mustache looks like it was stuck on crooked just before his entrance; his bow tie is also askew.

Both of these men are in Manhattan two days before Thanksgiving, and both want to get home for the holidays. Fate joins their destinies. Together they will endure every indignity that modern travel can inflict on its victims. What will torture them even more is being trapped in each other’s company. Del wants only to please. Neal wants only to be left alone.

John Hughes, who wrote, directed, and produced the film, is one of the most prolific filmmakers of the last twenty-five years. He is not often cited for greatness, although some of his titles, like The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Home Alone, have fervent admirers. What can be said for him is that he usually produces a real story about people he has clear ideas about; his many teenage comedies, for example, are miles more inventive than the recent sex-and-prom sagas. The buried story engine of Planes, Trains and Automobiles is not slowly growing friendship or odd-couple hostility (devices a lesser film might have employed), but empathy. It is about understanding how the other guy feels.

Del, we feel, was born with empathy. He instinctively identifies with Neal’s problems. He is genuinely sorry to learn he stole his cab. He is quick to offer help when their flight is diverted to Wichita, Kansas, and there are no hotel rooms available. Neal, on the other hand, depends on his credit cards and self-reliance. He wants to make his own plans, book his own room, rent his own car. He spends the movie trying to peel off from Del, and failing; Del spends the movie having his feelings hurt and then coming through for Neal anyway.

The movie could have been a shouting match like the unfortunate Odd Couple 2 (1998). Hughes is more subtle. The key early scene takes place in the Wichita motel room they have to share, when Neal explodes, telling Del his jokes stink, his stories are not interesting, and he would rather sit through an insurance seminar than listen to any more of the fat man’s pointless anecdotes. Look at Candy’s face fall. He shows Del as a man hurt and saddened—and not for the first time. Later he remembers how the most important person in his life once told him he was too eager to please, and shouldn’t always try so hard.

At this point, Del wins our hearts, and the movie is set up as more than a comedy. But a comedy it is. Not one movie a year contributes a catchphrase to the language. We remember Jack Nicholson ordering the toast. “If you build it, they will come.” “E.T., phone home.” “I’m walkin’ here!” “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” “Are you talking to me?”

And we remember the scene where Del and Neal wake up cuddled together in the cramped motel bed, and Neal asks Del where his hand is, and Del said it’s between some pillows, and Neal says, “Those aren’t pillows,” and the two men bolt out of bed in terror, and Neal shouts, “You see that Bears game last week?” and Del cries, “What a game! What a game! Bears gonna go all the way!” This is not homophobia but the natural reaction of two men raised to be shy and distant around other men—to fear misunderstood intimacy.

The other great comic set piece in the movie is responsible for its R rating; nothing else in the movie would qualify for other than PG-13. This is Neal’s verbal symphony for the f-word, performed by the desperate man after a rental-car bus strands him three miles from the terminal without a car. He has to walk back through the snow and mud, crossing runways, falling down embankments, until he finally faces a chirpy rental agent (Edie McClurg) who is chatting on the phone about the need for tiny marshmallows in the ambrosia. When she sweetly asks Neal if he is disturbed, he unleashes a speech in which the adjectival form of the f-word supplies the prelude to every noun, including itself, and is additionally used as punctuation. When he finishes, the clerk has a two-word answer that supplies one of the great moments in movie dialogue.