Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

“The movies that last, the ones we return to, don’t always have lofty themes or Byzantine complexities. Sometimes they last because they are arrows straight to the heart…It is perfectly cast and soundly constructed, and all else flows naturally. Steve Martin and John Candy don’t play characters; they embody themselves.” — Roger Ebert

SYNOPSIS

John Hughes turns the holiday travel nightmare into a comedy of irritation, humiliation, and unexpected companionship in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, his warmly bittersweet ode to the indignities of getting home for Thanksgiving. Steve Martin stars as tightly wound advertising executive Neal Page, whose increasingly desperate journey from New York to Chicago repeatedly throws him together with Del Griffith (John Candy), an endlessly talkative shower-curtain-ring salesman whose good intentions are matched only by his talent for making every bad situation worse. Flights are canceled, trains break down, cars are destroyed, and motel rooms become battlegrounds as Hughes subjects his mismatched travelers to an escalating gauntlet of comic disasters. Yet beneath the profanity, slapstick, and mounting exasperation lies an unusually tender understanding of loneliness, carried by Martin’s slow thaw and Candy’s funny, wounded, deeply humane performance. Few holiday comedies understand quite so well that getting home matters less than recognizing who might otherwise have nowhere to go.