Movies and the holiday season have a rather grand history. The holidays offer up ready-made stories of family ties both light and dark: tales of hatchets buried and exhumed, of the return of the black sheep, of dreams fulfilled and wishes granted. Movies do their part by taking these familiar domestic scenes and fashioning them—however convoluted the actual story—into something universal, fooling us into a kind of false remembrance. Some do it so well—A Christmas Story leaps immediately to mind—that we welcome a film into our annual affairs, watching it as a secular ritual and closing the circle of commerce and tradition.
Of course in Hollywood not all holidays are created equal, and Christmas has long ruled the roost—there’s just not much money in an Arbor Day movie, apparently. (Our Gang did it in 1936; Charlie Brown in 1976; no word on a 2016 entrant.) But if you’re celebrating Thanksgiving this week, you might be forgiven for wondering where the great movies are for this most familial of holidays. Even more than the December giant, Thanksgiving is a time ripe for all manner of drama, comedy, pathos and bathos. And those movies, it turns out, are out there. Here’s a look at a few.
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles probably comes the closest to the bar set by A Christmas Story. The 1987 John Hughes comedy paired Steve Martin and John Candy in an odd-couple story: Martin’s tight-laced ad exec Neal Page is thrown together with boisterous shower-ring salesman Del Griffith for a misguided adventure. With blizzards, fire, and robbery, a short flight devolves into a three-day trek across middle America as the pair try to find their ways home for Thanksgiving. (If it sounds familiar, you may have seen the Robert Downey, Jr./Zach Galifianakis comedy Due Date, out now and basically built on this film’s skeleton.) Matching Martin’s bite with Candy’s jollity proved winning, and Hughes’ film, coming on the heels of his teen comedies, is surprisingly grown up.
Jodie Foster’s 1995 film Home For The Holidays took a modern look at Thanksgiving, putting family dysfunction front and center. Holly Hunter drew acclaim as Claudia Larson, a single mom and just-fired art restorer who heads to the family homestead for a meal with gay brother Tommy (Downey, Jr. again), uptight sister Joanne, and handsome family friend Leo (Dylan McDermott). A good cast coupled with Foster’s intelligent direction brought the often-complicated dynamics of clan relations to life in a way still being explored in prime-time dramas today.
For even deeper dysfunction, try Ang Lee’s 1997 drama The Ice Storm, which, though set during Thanksgiving 1973, is decidedly non-holiday in tone. Based on the novel by Rick Moody, Lee’s critical hit (it was a flop at the box office) was a tale of adultery, alcoholism, and Watergate. In it, he follows two Connecticut families through a maze of deception and self-deception until a shocking accident forces them to wake up from their self-induced stupor. With a disquieting stillness, Lee and his stellar cast bring the era fully to life.
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Also this week: Tamara Drewe opens at Pleasant Street Theater. Based on the Posy Simmonds comic strip (originally published in British newspaper The Guardian) the film is an update to the English pastoral. Gemma Arterton stars as the titular journalist, who returns to the village of her youth to sell off an inherited home. Once considered no great prize, the now-stunning Drewe turns the town on its ear. As she waits to sell the family home, the constant bubble of gossip in Ewedown proves potent enough to make Drewe consider staying for good. Light, frothy, quintessentially English fun, it was directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen, High Fidelity, Dirty Pretty Things).
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
