Review: Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987)

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Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987) is the story of Neal Page's hellish journey home to be with his wife and children for Thanksgiving. Part road-trip, part slapstick, and part perfectly pitched for the holidays (and each facet adding to the charm of this gem), Planes, Trains & Automobiles is a highly entertaining film that is not only a top-tier comedy but could just be the best Thanksgiving movie ever made.

Steve Martin stars as Page, a white-collar commuter, who has been spending too much time on the eastern seaboard working and not enough time at home in Chicago living. With the holiday coming up he has sworn to make the most of the long weekend and to get back in time for dinner. Everything seems perfect, he thinks, just have to get to the airport, get on the plane, and get home.

But everything is hardly ever perfect, and it just so happens that the perfect storm of inconvenience has pinned a bulls-eye to Page's chest—the perfect marriage of a western front of ice and a nomadic Eastern pull from a shower ring salesman named Del Griffith (played by John Candy).

And with that, as they say, hilarity ensues.

With each new incident, each new conflict (iced-over airports, booked-up hotels, stolen cash and rental cars, etc.), the story moves onto setup after setup as the two men try desperately to get to Chicago. And so it goes, stop to stop, from planes to trains to automobiles, and so the viewer goes, happily along with the two comedic greats playing well against each other.

Written, Directed, and Produced by John Hughes, Planes, Trains & Automobiles is a smooth, quick-paced comedy that explores the bonds developed between strangers in times of personal crisis, where one of the men (Page) is a Type A tightass cynic and the other is a warm-hearted, outgoing lug, whose biggest deficit is that he doesn't know when to quit (talking, helping, etc.).

Those aren't pillows!

Martin plays Page to a T, as really only Martin can. His meltdown at the rental car company is one of the greatest bits ever put to print and still draws healthy laughs after so many years. The only puzzling aspect about this scene is that it takes an otherwise hard-PG movie and turns it automatically into an R. (Yes, the nudie pics in the taxi, yes, but there have been nude scenes in other films of a hard-PG before, and we're talking about pics.)

God, I hope they don't remake this (really, they've "remade" it a few times already, but I'm just being hypothetical), but I can't help imagining some jackass exec is sitting around with a fan-script and just cutting the hell and guts out of this film just to save a PG-13 or a PG rating.

Morons.

'Cause I'm the real article. What you see is what you get.

Candy's Griffith is played masterfully by the late, great comedian, and watching him transform from the annoying chatter-box fat guy (the stereotype among the elites in the arts) into the very kind, even though flawed, man he sees himself as being is one of great pleasures of the movie.

There are moments in Planes, Trains & Automobiles that really grab for the viewer and they mostly revolve around Candy. The performance is made even more bittersweet just thinking of what a talent he was and the reminder attached that he is no more.

An excellent film made by excellent actors and the often wonderful Hughes, Planes, Trains & Automobiles is a must for anyone's holiday pleasure. Sweet and funny were never put together so swell.

For its Genre/Era/X: Awesome.

Overall: Awesome.

Rated R for Language and Nudie Pics and Themes. (Hahaha. . .Seriously, WTF are Themes? I joke?)

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