10 / 10
The Thanksgiving Film
Planes, Trains and Automobiles is the Thanksgiving film. It’s one of the funniest films ever made, and it’s also the film where John Candy breaks your heart, no matter how many times you’ve seen it. Most comedies wear out after a few viewings, because you know the jokes. This one gets better, because once you know how it ends, every scene before it changes.
John Hughes wrote and directed it in 1987, right after his run of teenage films, and it was the first time he turned his gift for comic set pieces onto adults. It’s a 10, and I’d put it alongside Airplane! at the very top.
Two Days Before Thanksgiving
Neal Page is an uptight advertising executive in New York, trying to get home to his wife and children in Chicago for Thanksgiving. It should be a short flight. First a stranger steals his taxi. Then his flight is delayed, then diverted to Wichita because of snow in Chicago, and every hotel room in town is taken.
On every step of that disastrous day, he keeps running into the same man: Del Griffith, a large, cheerful, talkative traveling salesman who sells shower curtain rings, who took the taxi, who’s sitting next to him on the plane, and who knows a motel where there might be one room left.
From there, the film is one long trip across the middle of America by plane, train, bus, rental car and a car that’s on fire, and neither man gets home when he should. Every mode of transport fails in a new and more humiliating way, and every failure forces the two of them back together just as Neal thinks he’s finally escaped.
Hughes Grows Up
After Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, this was Hughes’ first comedy about grown men. He reportedly wrote it quickly, drawing on a real travel nightmare of his own, and it keeps the gift for comic set pieces that made the teen films work.
What it adds is something the teen films rarely had: two middle-aged men, both a little lonely, neither of them the person he presents to the world. Neal is sharp and successful and has lost his patience with everyone. Del is warm and easygoing and hiding something. The film is about both of them being found out.
Quietly, the film is about class, too. Neal is an advertising executive who flies first class and expects the world to work for him. Del sells shower curtain rings out of a trunk. The film never lectures about it, and it lets the audience notice who turns out to be the better man.
Steve Martin’s Straight Man
Martin had spent his career as the wild one, the man with the arrow through his head and the happy feet. Here he plays the uptight, fastidious straight man, and he’s superb. Neal isn’t unlikeable. He’s exhausted, snobbish and holding his temper so tightly that it’s funnier than if he lost it.
When he does lose it, it’s glorious, and Martin makes every explosion feel earned by the hours of swallowed frustration before it. You can also see, underneath, how badly Neal wants to get home to a family he loves. That’s what keeps him sympathetic even at his worst.
John Candy’s Del
Candy plays Del Griffith, and it’s the best thing he ever did. Del is irritating, generous, loud and lonely, a man who makes friends by selling them something and who never stops talking because silence is where the sadness lives. He’s too much, all the time, and he knows it.
Candy never asks you to feel sorry for Del. He plays every scene with good cheer, and he lets the loneliness leak through only in small moments, a pause, a look, a story about his wife told a little too carefully. It’s a performance of real delicacy from a man usually cast as the funny big guy, and it’s the reason the film lasts.
The performance shows what Candy could have done with more roles like it. He was usually cast as the lovable buffoon, and here he gets to be lovable, funny and quietly tragic in the same scene, and he makes it look effortless.
For Writers
Candy lets Del’s loneliness leak through only in small moments, a pause, a look, a story told too carefully. He never asks the audience to feel sorry for him.
When you write a character with a hidden sadness, stating it or letting them dwell on it drains its power. Readers resist being told to feel pity.
Show your character cheerful in most scenes, and let the truth slip out in two or three brief moments that are easy to miss. Save the full reveal for the end.
The Motel Bed
In Wichita, the only room left has one bed, and the two men share it. They wake in the morning wrapped around each other, and the slow realization of where Del’s hand is and what Neal thinks he’s holding, followed by both of them leaping up and talking loudly about football, is one of the great comic reveals.
Before that, the night itself is a small masterpiece of irritation: Del’s noises, his habits, his towels, his cigarette, the thin walls and the snoring. Every small thing Del does is exactly the thing Neal can least tolerate, and Martin’s face goes through every stage of suppressed fury. It ends with Neal finally telling Del exactly what he thinks of him, cruelly and at length.
The timing is perfect. The pause before either man speaks, the slow shift in their faces and the desperate, overlapping chatter about the Chicago Bears are all perfectly judged, and the laugh keeps building long after the scene ends.
I Like Me
Del’s answer to that outburst is where the film turns. He tells Neal quietly that he knows what he is, that he’s easy to make fun of and doesn’t care, because he likes himself, and his wife likes him. Then he lies down and goes to sleep.
Candy plays it so simply it breaks your heart. It’s the first sign that Del is more than a joke, and it changes how Neal sees him and how we do. From then on, the two of them are traveling together by choice, even if neither will admit it, and Neal’s insults start to sound more like the complaints of an old friend than the contempt of a stranger.
The speech makes the whole film work. Without it, Del would be a punchline with a trunk. With it, he’s a man the audience starts rooting for, and the rest of the trip becomes a slow friendship instead of a string of disasters.
For Writers
Del’s quiet reply to Neal’s cruelty turns the film. He admits exactly what he’s and refuses to be ashamed of it, and the balance between the two men shifts.
When you write an argument, the strongest response to an attack is often not a counter-attack. A calm, frank answer can change the scene more than a louder insult.
Next time a character is insulted in your story, try having them agree with the insult and explain why it doesn’t matter. See how the other character responds.
The Rental Car Counter
Later, stranded again, Neal takes a shuttle to a rental car lot, walks a very long way through the snow to find his car isn’t there, walks all the way back and delivers a furious, obscene rant to the agent at the desk, packing more swearing into one minute than the rest of the film put together.
Edie McClurg’s calm, cheerful reply, as the agent, is the perfect punchline. It’s the scene that earned the film its R rating, and it’s the scene everybody quotes, because anyone who has ever been let down by a rental company has wanted to say every word of it.
The Burning Car
The rental car Del eventually drives catches fire after a series of disasters, including a spell driving the wrong way down a highway, and they carry on anyway, in a blackened shell with melted doors and a radio that somehow still works. Del is delighted that the radio works.
When a state trooper pulls them over, Michael McKean’s deadpan inspection of the wreck is priceless. It’s the film’s view of Del in miniature. Whatever goes wrong, he finds something to be pleased about, and by now Neal has started, grudgingly, to find it funny too.
The Ending
Near the end, the two finally part at a Chicago train station, and Neal heads home. On the way, he thinks back over everything Del said, and he works out the truth. Del’s wife died eight years ago. He has no home to go to. He travels because he has nowhere else to be.
Neal goes back and finds him sitting alone in the station, and brings him home for Thanksgiving. The last shot is Del carrying his enormous trunk up to the house while Neal’s family welcomes him in. There’s no speech and no big realization said out loud. The music swells, Neal’s wife smiles, and Del is inside. It lands every time, however well you know it’s coming.
Hughes trusts the audience completely in these last minutes. He doesn’t explain what Neal is thinking. He lets Martin’s face do it, and the reveal about Del lands harder because nobody says it out loud until the very end.
For Writers
Del’s secret is planted throughout the film in plain sight, in his stories and his reluctance to part company. The ending lands because we were told and never put it together.
Plant three small clues to your hidden truth early, disguised as jokes or characterization, so the reader can find them on a second read. I’ve gone into this further in my piece on foreshadowing.
When you write a reveal, the reader’s surprise should come with recognition. If the clues aren’t there, the ending feels like a trick instead of a truth.
Hughes and Candy
John Candy and John Hughes worked together several times, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles is the high point of the partnership. Candy had a small, very funny role as a theme park security guard in National Lampoon’s Vacation, written by Hughes. After this film he starred in The Great Outdoors, written and produced by Hughes, and then Uncle Buck. Hughes wrote and directed that one himself.
Hughes understood something about Candy that other directors often missed. Candy was a gifted comic, and he was also capable of real tenderness, and Hughes kept writing parts that let him be both at once. Del Griffith is the purest example: a big, loud, irritating man whose kindness is the most important thing about him.
Candy also turned up in a small role in Home Alone, another Hughes production, as a polka band leader who gives Kevin’s mother a lift home. The part is tiny, and he plays it with the same warmth as Del. It’s another reminder of how much Hughes valued him. Watching their films together now, after Candy’s early death, gives them an added sadness. Planes, Trains and Automobiles is the one where everything came together. It’s the one people remember them both by.
It’s also a reminder of what Hughes did best when he wasn’t writing about teenagers. His adults are as lost and awkward as his high school students, and just as desperate for someone to see them clearly. Del Griffith is the purest version of that idea.
Two Temperaments on the Page
Hughes built the whole film on a simple principle: put two incompatible temperaments in a confined space and keep them there. Neal wants order, silence and control. Del wants company, conversation and comfort. Every scene is a small negotiation between those needs, and neither man ever fully wins.
It’s why the comedy never feels mechanical. The disasters are external, but the laughs come from how each man reacts to them, and by the end, each has absorbed a little of the other’s way of seeing the world.
What Planes, Trains and Automobiles Gets Right
Because it’s a perfect comedy that turns out to be about loneliness. Every disaster is a set piece, every set piece brings the two men a little closer, and the ending recasts everything that came before it. Del’s cheerfulness, his refusal to part company, his stories about his wife: all of it is a lonely man trying to stretch out a few days of company.
John Candy died in 1994, at forty-three, and this is the role he’s remembered for. It’s the best Thanksgiving film there is, and one of the best comedies of the eighties.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Planes, Trains and Automobiles hides its emotional truth inside its comedy. Del’s clues are there from the first act, and the ending lands because we were told all along and never put it together.
When you write a comedy, the laughs can carry the reader so fast that they don’t stop to notice what the jokes are telling them. That’s an opportunity.
Use your funniest scenes to plant your saddest facts. Readers will remember the laugh and forget the clue, until the ending gives it back to them.
The Verdict on Planes, Trains and Automobiles
Yes. It’s a 10. It’s the best Thanksgiving film there’s and one of the funniest films of the eighties. Watch it for Martin’s rant and the motel bed, and stay for Candy’s last scene.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists