Before Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, John Hughes was King of Teen-Screen Comedy. He's at right, barely post-teen himself, but this photo, among very few since his Salinger-like seclusion before his death, is fairly "official"--Wikipediawise--as if he wanted to preserve a lost iconic era. Starting with Sixteen Candles (1984), he auteur-ed (and was writer-only on several others not so good) The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985), and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986). Teen-agers suffering terminal teen-angst abound in these films--worked through in well-staged productions, coherent structure, and fairly realistic dialogue (even in the enjoyable Weird Science, where the hormonal angst is purged through pure fantasy and Kelly Le Brock).These are one-time, thoroughly watchable movies, but they barely go beyond stereotype in both plot and character--the jock, the geek, the rich kid, etc.--or predictability. You'd have to be a teenager to give them a second viewing. Not in the same class as, for instance, Cameron Crowe's teen-oriented movies, roughly contemporaneous, like the seminal Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1982), from which I think Hughes borrowed a bit, and the magical John Cusack vehicle, Say Anything (1989). Deeper, and therefore more fully comic. Crowe's teenagers actually strive to grow up, struggle to deal with some very adult issues, and to take responsibility or not for their success or failure. Hughes' characters simply come to terms with their teen stereotypes, or not. Good fun, though.
With Planes Hughes had himself a truly adult comedy. There's plenty of Ferris Bueller in John Candy's free-wheeling salesman Del Griffith, and a whole lot of stereotypical geek in Steve Martin's fastidious adman Neal Page. A connection to Hughes' earlier work. These perfectly-cast characters are grown-ups all right, but they have to grow out of some of their self-destructive, almost adolescent "hang-ups" to become more fully-realized adults. And in the the end they take what they need from each other to do just that. Thrown together by chance, then necessity, they find themselves in an "Odd Couple" road-trip kind of story. Pretty simple, really--thus, profound. Through the power of friendship they grow together and become greater than the sum of their parts.
Meanwhile, we're treated to enjoyable doses of slapstick--"Fat man fall on face ... funny"--of comedic misdirection and discomfiture, as they endure their ill-starred odyssey across the Midwest in various, somehow-always-unreliable modes of transportation. It's an on-the-road, "buddy-picture" in this way--complete with raucous car-chase and crash--with roots all the way back to Cervantes and anywhere up to the movie it most reminds me of: the estimable Midnight Run (1988), co-starring Grodin and DeNiro in a similar love-hate partnership. Like them, Candy and Martin become friends in spite of themselves.
That's because underneath it all they're both good-hearted guys. However, Candy is "too eager to please" (his late wife had told him), giving way too much of himself to make friends, so that he really can't. Especially not with someone as rigidly punctilious and outwardly self-reliant as Martin--always "under-eager" to give anything of himself. That's his problem. But by the end of their tribulations, betwixt the two of them they have rubbed off those rough edges and reached a happy compromise. It's very important to this unfolding theme that Martin learn of the death of Candy's wife only AFTER he decides to return to the train station and invite Candy to his home for Thanksgiving ... literally and figuratively. Martin must unconditionally give; Candy, unashamedly take. (more)
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