Planes, Trains & Automobiles

As I sit here tonight, cradling a full stomach and nursing a head cold, I've turned to two things for comfort: Nyquil (so forgive me if this review slips into the realm of garbled non-sequitur when that miraclous green sludge kicks in) and Planes, Trains & Automobiles. There's something wretchedly pathetic about a 20-year-old's nostalgia, particularly for something that's actually older than he is, but I wonder we'll ever have another film of its kind. A Thanksgiving film, I mean. Every other major holiday has numerous films that revolve around that particularly day (well, maybe Independence Day is the only one for July 4, but that film so inadvertently summarizes that holiday that no one needed to try again). Heck, one has a veritable pick of the litter for Christmas, whether you like so-sugary-it'll-give-you-diabetes nostalgia (A Christmas Story), family-is-hell farce (Christmas Vacation) or even love-to-hate cynicism (Bad Santa). And I'm not even counting the approximately 12,000 versions of Dickens' A Christmas Carol (though attention must be paid to The Muppet Christmas Carol, king of the adaptations and indeed the Christmas genre).

Thanksgiving, if I might break out the soapbox now and be done with it, doesn't even exist anymore. Now, Thanksgiving is merely a feast to build and store one's energy for the subsequent Christmas shopping spree. Christ, the economy was so bad this year that Black Friday started on Monday. Of course, this isn't entirely a recent occurrence; one could spot the trouble on the horizon all the way back to 1947's Miracle on 34th Street, a staple of the Christmas genre, which builds its plot upon an opening at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. That was the real Red Tide of the late '40s, one that foresaw our current situation, in which the Ghost of Christmas Future has become the Present, his skeletal talons clawing for yet more territory by eviscerating our beloved celebration of a time when we relied on the Native Americans for food, before we figured it out for ourselves and killed them in repayment (be thankful we were the only ones with guns!).

I suppose -- as I appear dead-set on derailing this review before it even begins, spurred on by the tongue-loosening treacle that is the deadly Q, its green haze slowly clouding my vision -- that this is as good a time as any to discuss the late John Hughes. As a child of the '90s, and someone who's never really fit in with the youth zeitgeist anyway, Hughes doesn't hold the place in my heart he does for the Gen X'ers. I find that his screenplays typically waver between hip youth comedies that do not age well and message-heavy pictures that slam on the brakes at odd intervals to remind of Serious Issues (there is a great deal of overlap between the two).*

That may be one of the many reasons why I so dearly love his masterpiece Planes, Trains & Automobiles. Neither facile comedy nor a heavy-handed issues picture, it instead finds the best elements of both of these styles while omitting the weaker aspects of the rest of Hughes' corpus. For make no mistake: this is a farce, albeit one played with a straight face rather than a winking nod. It is also, at times, dramatic and serious, but its messages are fluidly integrated into the film instead of set apart and lit with neon. It is also a holiday film that impressively links to the deeper meanings behind its holiday beyond superficial lip service.

As farce requires simplicity, Hughes' story can be summed up in a single sentence: a man attempts to go home for Thanksgiving but cannot. The man in question is Neal Page (Steve Martin), an advertising executive currently working in New York and set to fly back home to Chicago to see his family for the first time in weeks. But a meeting runs long, his cab is stolen and the flight is delayed. When he finally gets on a plane, he's bumped from first class to coach, and then the plane must divert to Wichita due to a blizzard.

Adding to this misery is one Del Griffith (John Candy), the man who stole Neal's cab and, of course, sat next to him in his downgraded coach seat. Del is the sort of person who embodies the idea of "trying too hard": he's a kind, affable man, but he treats strangers like close friends, regaling them with long-winded stories that cannot qualify as anecdotes because they ultimately serve no point. Even his laugh is overly ingratiating, widening his mouth to swallow his face to emit a staccato chuckle of a laugh. He makes a living selling shower ring curtains (or earrings, depending on whom he's pitching), the sort of prosaic, meaningless occupation that seems perfectly fitting. He offers to use his connections to get Neal a room in Wichita, setting in motion one of the weirder buddy movies, a genre that is predicated on off-kilter juxtapositions.

Though the buddy film had existed for years, Martin and Candy almost seem like the archetypes for the genre's characters: Martin, the detached, ironic stand-up, is perfect as the uptight, no-nonsense character, while the lovable, physically comic Candy can make Del's exaggerations identifiable. At the motel in Wichita, Neal, fed up with the day's events, unleashes on Del, criticizing him for the exact things we all feel for his ilk -- a hatred of his "amusing" stories, his irritating cheerfulness, the way people like that think that laughing off serious problems is a valid way of handling them and thus wondering why normal people get stress -- and Candy's slow deflation is one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever seen in the movies. And then, he rallies; "Yeah, you're right," he calmly states. "I talk too much. I also listen too much. I could be a cold-hearted cynic like you... but I don't like to hurt people's feelings." He says, with childlike yet forceful simplicity, "I like me," and the effect is so staggering even Neal stops in his tracks.

The rest of the journey unites the two in an odd friendship, as they suffer yet more setbacks and find a certain comfort from this mad world in each other. A thief nabs the cash out of both their wallets, but at least Neal has a credit card. Until their rental car catches fire with his wallet inside. They hitch rides at times, but they never seem to make it into the actual cabs, always stuck in the backs of trucks in the middle of snow-blanketed Kansas and Missouri. Yet the trip is therapeutic, softening Neal's self-absorption and taming the more insufferable attributes of Del's kindness. Such moments grow naturally from the ills that befall the pair, and they never obstruct the comedy, which is as bountiful and filling as a Turkey Day feast.

Two bits continue to strike me as particularly hilarious: the first takes place in the Wichita motel, the morning after their argument and subsequent burying of the hatchet. Sharing a bed, they each reached out to their imagined loved ones in the night, waking to find themselves spooning and holding hands. "Where's your other hand?" asks Neal. "Between two pillows." "Those aren't pillows!" It starts with typical homophobic jitters and gagging, then Hughes pushes it further until he mocks such responses with Neal and Del's desperate attempts to find something macho to discuss to prove how manly they are. "See that Bears game last week?" "Yeah, helluva a game, helluva game. Bears gotta great team this year." There's also something tremendously funny about the way this scene of mock-post-coital cuddling coming off their harsh conversation the night before, a subtle evocation of makeup sex.

The other notable comic triumph, and the film's most famous scene, occurs at a rental car agency. After receiving the keys to the wrong car and being forced to walk three miles back from the airport to the agency, Neal looks like he might produce a shotgun at any minute and start indiscriminately killing customer and representative alike. He approaches the counter of a woman enjoying a personal phone conversation who waves him off when he clears his throat. When she at least hangs up and turns to him with one of those painted-on smiles, he launches into a tirade. In the space of one minute, Martin uses the word "fuck" 18 times in a picture that would have otherwise barely garnered a PG rating. The concentration of the film's swearing into this one scene makes it hilarious, more so because Martin does not grandstand and shout but hisses silently in true anger.

The ending comes with a twist, but one designed to enhance the emotional weight of the story, not create some out of thin air. Its happy ending is not saccharine but deeply felt, a validation of the men's trials as evidenced in Neal's flashbacks on the train, in which Hughes contrasts thoughts of his children and his memories of his time with Del, both of which elicit the same smiling, loving reaction. Before fading out to the credits, the frame freezes on John Candy's smiling visage, smiling so that his pudgy cheeks push his eyes into squints, and I am reminded of the great pain of losing someone so vibrant. I remember as a kid just wanting to reach through the screen of his movies and hug John candy, feeling it would be like hugging Winnie the Pooh and Santa Claus all at once. Even now, I see the way his great mound of flesh wriggles when he laughs, or the way that a simple slump of his shoulders can bring me as close to tears as the end of Casablanca. So I lament him, as I do Hughes, for all his weakness. I also mourn the passage of films like this, broad comedies with a true heart, the likes of which Judd Apatow and his sphere of influence has been trying to recreate for years now without the recipe. And, as this film is so much a part of its subject, I mourn Thanksgiving, the fading luster of its wonderful message, no matter how dark the truth behind it might be.

Yet, if I stopped there, I would be just as guilty of casting aside the holiday, so let me really blog here for a minute and discuss that for which I give thanks. Friends and family are a given, but consider this my thanks anyway. For Roger Ebert, Jonathan Rosenbuam, Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris, Dave Kehr, James Agee, Cahiers, Film Comment, and all the other intelligent critics and film publications out there who have offered and continue to offer revealing, beautifully written criticism and analysis of the cinema. For Deron Overpeck, my Intro to Film Studies professor last year, the only witty, enthusiastic and utterly engaging professor I've yet had in college after almost three full years. For David Bordwell, whose instructional writings reassure me that I might be able to learn something about academic film studies when my college offers so few courses on film. For Bergman, Scorsese, Herzog, Welles, Kurosawa, Kubrick, Peckinpah, Ford, Lynch, Kaufman, Lang and Murnau. For Whedon, Simon and Sorkin. For filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, who are so independent and confident that they continue to make films that don't cater to anyone's wishes, including those of people like myself who consider ourselves adventurous moviegoers. For people like Jim Emerson, James Berardinelli, Tim Brayton, Ed Howard, Jason Bellamy -- to name but an obscenely omissive few -- who prove that serious, well-written criticism is not only possible on the Internet but greatly abetted by it.

And lastly, I'm thankful for those who somehow found this blog, read it and gave me feedback and suggestions. Your input is invaluable to me and I can only hope that I receive more in the future. Thank you. Oh, and thank you, Nyquil, for easing this sore throat with your sickly sweet serum. You may take me to the land of the dreamless sleep now.



*I confess that I was somewhat amused to check his IMDb profile and see that he wrote the remake of Miracle on 34th Street. It's a small world after all, huh?

Bowfinger

At the top of his game, there's no one quite like Steve Martin. A combination of ham-handed vaudevillian and ironic commentator, he makes straight man roles inherently loopy and can deliver the zaniest dialogue with a stone face. Who else could deliver the overused "and by X I mean Y" joke construct and make it seem as if he'd just invented it? Apart from Andy Kaufman, no other modern comedian could lay such a concrete claim to being a "song and dance man," given his work in front of and behind the camera as well as forays into banjo playing. Starting in the late '80s Martin reinvented his comic persona to take on a more contemplative and satiric bent, and Bowfinger is the capper of his second era, the one that gave us hits like Parenthood and the classics Planes, Trains and Automobiles and L.A. Story.

Like L.A. Story, Bowfinger takes aim at life in Los Angeles, but Martin this time focuses more on Hollywood and the craft of filmmaking than the all-encompassing feeling of his masterpiece. He plays Bobby Bowfinger, a middle-aged cinephile who's devoted his life to running a production company and has only an empty shell of one to show for it. He prevents his actress friend from getting work because he's always convinced that the right script is just about to fall in his lap, and the only person he ever confides in is a young camera operator named Dave (Jamie Kennedy). Bowfinger's been content to string along the small band of denied dreamers for years, but he finally sees the writing on the wall as he approaches his 50th birthday -- in true Martin style, he says that, at 49, he can still pass for 44, well, 41. Well, 38, but at 50 you're done -- and he concentrates on getting just one picture done before Hollywood declares him dead.

So, when his accountant hands him a script entitled Chubby Rain, about aliens who invade Earth via raindrops, he leaps into action. Bowfinger gives a moving speech to Dave about saving up a dollar a week since he was 10 to make a film someday, and he triumphantly opens a box full of singles and announces that he has a whopping $2,184 from his diligence. That's the first big laugh of the film, and Martin kicks things into high gear at this point, highlighting this goofy band of misfits as they scramble to make a film.

Amazingly, for all its silliness and off-kilter charm, every little piece of Martin's script works. Heather Graham shows up as a sweet Midwestern gal who dreams of being in the movies, but as soon as she lands a part in the picture she demonstrates a keen grasp on sexual politics: she hangs off of Dave and Afrim the accountant until she makes her way to Bowfinger himself. She even displays a willingness to "switch teams" to get ahead (a commentary on Martin's brief relationship with Anne Heche, perhaps?). Bowfinger uses Dave's occupation as a studio-employed cameraman to nick equipment for free, much to Dave's constant fear. Pent up for years, possibly decades, waiting for Bobby to make a film to liberate her, Carol hysterically falls into every bad acting trope in the book, be it a terrible and wholly unsolicited British accent or a sudden case of ego.

Martin weathers everything he throws at his sadsack with adroit timing. Chubby Rain takes the term "guerrilla filmmaking" to new levels, as Bowfinger pulls up to streets in L.A., unloads his crew and tries to get in a few takes before the cops show up looking for a permit. In a brilliant piece of Hollywood satire, a cop pulls up to check their paperwork before it's even fully apparent that they're there to shoot something, only for Martin to offer the officer a role instead. When he discovers that Daisy's love extends only as far as the next rung on the social ladder, he confronts her over her infidelity. "So?" she asks in a tone that betrays how meaningless sex and sexual partners are to her, and Martin takes only enough time to run his eyes up and down Graham's figure before replying, "You know, I never thought of it that way."

As good as Martin is, though, it's Eddie Murphy who makes the movie, putting in his second finest performance(s) after The Nutty Professor. He plays Kit Ramsey, the most bankable movie star in Hollywood but also the victim of mental instability and paranoia. Imagine then his utter terror when Bowfinger, who needs Ramsey to sell his film to a distributor (Robert Downey, Jr.) but doesn't have remotely the money needed to pay Ramsey's rate, simply decides to film the actor without his knowledge, much less consent. Bowfinger convinces his actors that Ramsey is simply method acting, so they run up to him on the street and recite their lines concerning alien invasions, or they trigger squibs and other gory effects to seemingly melt before his eyes. Murphy fleshes out Ramsey with very little screen time, establishing him first as an egomaniac with a persecution complex -- when we meet him, he's berating his agent after searching for the letter 'k' in the script he received, dividing it by three, and shouting that "KKK" appears exactly 486 times in the pages -- and then as the paranoid mess comforted by Scientology knockoff MindHead.

The flip side of Murphy's performance is that of Jiff, Kit's brother and a dead ringer for the mega star. Where Kit is handsome and beloved by all, Jiff works oddjobs, can't see at all without his dorky glasses and appears to have sported braces since his baby teeth fell out. A completely one-dimensional character, Jiff nevertheless works because of how deeply Murphy commits to this weirdo. All Jiff wants to do is "real" work, so he agrees to be an assistant for Bowfinger to fetch coffee and the like, but naturally the producer exploits Jiff's resemblance to his brother and uses him as a body and stunt double. In the film's best comedic sequence, Bowfinger has Kiff run across an L.A. freeway as an action scene. Thanks to Frank Oz's skillful direction, which captures the cars only as blurs, I felt genuine terror watching Jiff try to make his way across eight lanes of traffic -- twice of course; you always need retakes -- even, as Martin points out, the cars are driven by professionals.

In some ways, Bowfinger is as revealing about the ins-and-outs of the industry as The Player: Martin's character believes he has a winner in Afrim's script simply because it ends with the catchphrase, "Gotcha, suckers," but Downey's executive gives Bowfinger his shot solely because he likes the phrase. In Ramsey's first rant, he rails against black people never getting any good catchphrases, as they go to Schwarzenegger, Stallone, or other white stars. Graham's character is a manipulative succubus who just might make it one day because of her shrewdness and certainly not her talent. But it's also a story of hope, one that vindicates these insane people through the sensation of making art (or whatever the hell it is you'd call Chubby Rain). These two aspects never fully gel for, as with all things to come from Steve Martin, you can never find solid ground because he never lets on what is sincere and what is simply an ironic ruse. Nevertheless, Bowfinger is a triumph, if not altogether great, about the joys of filmmaking, ultimately every bit as earnest as Tim Burton's Ed Wood and just as concerned with prying the beauty from B-movie absurdity. It's not the best Hollywood movie out there, but it's one of them, and it's lighthearted enough to be enjoyed on a rainy Sunday or a film class.