SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
Promoted as teen-movie guru John Hughes’ first adult comedy, no doubt on the strength of a number of profanity-laden sequences, Planes, Trains & Automobiles is an enjoyable addition to the mismatched travelling companions road movie. Ultimately erring towards sentimentality and mawkishness, there is nonetheless an unexpected darkness at the film’s core. Hughes quite deftly balances the film’s comic and dramatic elements, interspersing the moments of absurdist humour dealing with the horror of interpersonal contact and a world in which even the most mundane objects seem destined to thwart and frustrate with oddly disquieting observations on the impossibility of companionship and what it means to be alone.
En route to Chicago to spend Thanksgiving with his family, irascible businessman Neal Page (Steve Martin) finds that his first-class plane ticket has been demoted, forcing him to share his flight with boorish shower-curtain-ring salesman Del Griffith (John Candy). A sudden snowstorm in Chicago forces the plane to land in Wichita, Kansas, and unable to find four-star accommodation, Neal is compelled to accept Del’s invitation to flop at his more modest motel. Driven to distraction by Del’s annoying personal habits, the ungrateful Neal lets forth with a stream of verbal abuse. Left somewhat shamefaced by Del’s obvious offence and hurt, Neal tries to make amends by agreeing to act as a travelling companion back to Chicago. However, tensions soon reappear alongside Del’s inane anecdotes as the pair’s journey assumes increasingly desperate and ultimately epic levels after encounters involving a train, a tractor and a hired car.
Etching the loneliness of its protagonists in a number of well-written scenes that assert a mutual sense of alienation despite Neal’s trappings of money and family, the film ultimately motors towards redemption; in time-honoured fashion the mismatched pair are bosom buddies at the end of their cross-country odyssey, with all quirks and hostilities forgotten. This conciliation is sealed when Del receives an invite to Neal’s sumptuous Thanksgiving dinner. But still there lingers the sense that he will undoubtedly have to return to his more modest world, and Neal will similarly revert to reactionary, bullying type.
Though not quite vintage Martin, Planes, Trains & Automobiles certainly has more than its fair share of extremely funny moments and is fondly remembered for a scene in which the incompatibles share a bed, only for Neal to confuse Del’s buttocks for pillows. Some of the sight gags are similarly crude but nonetheless effective: a seemingly inevitable car crash precipitating the digging of nails into the dashboard followed by a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it insert shot to reveal the passenger’s reversion to skeleton form. The two leads work well together too, Candy giving a career-best performance as an incorrigible but ultimately endearing travelling companion, the perfect comic foil to Martin’s frustrated, maniacal but not too monstrous Everyman.
Jason Wood, 100 Road Movies (BFI Screen Guides, 2007)
A contemporary review
In something of a departure from his recent teen movies, John Hughes constructs a comedy about two adults struggling with life’s vicissitudes and each other. Much of the film’s pleasure lies in the wit of the script and performances: Steve Martin as wealthy, intolerant advertising executive Neal Page, and John Candy as shower-curtain ring salesman Del Griffith (‘Go with the flow’ he advises), whose loud mouth and dress and terrible personal habits hide a true forbearance and heart of gold. An intimate relationship is forced on them when Neal is drawn into Del’s chaotic world by a series of transport problems and attendant mishaps during a Thanksgiving trip from New York to Chicago. Much of the humour is based on class, encapsulated in the credit cards each owns – Neal’s Visa and Nieman Marcus against Del’s small-town Tall Man Shop.
Del Griffith fills the screen with the effluence of his life style – scattered Crackerjack boxes, burst beer cans, discarded clothes – which crowd Neal into constant confrontation with his unwanted but inescapable co-traveller. Del’s plethora of consumables and chatty personality take the place of Neal’s solvency and loving family, and it is this recognition and subtle expose of the divide between haves and have nots, in both a financial and emotional sense, which informs the film’s broad comedy. The scenes of Neal’s ‘perfect’ family which are interspersed with the journey echo those in films like Fatal Attraction and Someone to Watch Over Me, as does the presentation of city life (here extended to encompass travel) as alienating and intolerable. The family is seen as life’s focus and anchor, to be striven for through unimaginable difficulties. But in Planes, Trains & Automobiles, the underlying socialism subverts any Reaganite interpretation of the reunion between Neal, his wife, children and in-laws as Del looks on and Thanksgiving dinner waits.
Another pleasing aspect of Planes, Trains & Automobiles is its emphasis on the possibility of male friendship which goes beyond conventional areas such as work and macho camaraderie to an understanding of emotional needs and a certain thoughtfulness. Neal and Del’s homophobia when they are first forced to share a room develops into an enjoyment of each other’s company when Neal invites Del to join him in the second motel – ‘Why do I feel like I’m in summer camp?’ Neal asks – their joking and philosophising aided by consumption of the room’s supply of alcoholic miniatures. The other characters encountered en route are as well observed as the central duo, from Larry Hankin’s hot-rod taxi driver to Edie McClurg’s affronted car-rental agent, each ensuring Neal suffers maximum irritation along the way, but also by the end prompting his remark that he’s a ‘little wiser’.
Janet Hawken, Monthly Film Bulletin, June 1988
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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