There are not very many movies about Thanksgiving. I’m not sure why. It’s a distinctively American holiday; maybe it’s even a tradition. I wrote about it for the Acton Institute. I hope you find this intriguing:
These are unhappy times in America & there’s little movies can do to fix whatever’s wrong with us, but they can at least dramatize the American puzzle—America is a nation of unusually charitable, unusually religious people for a modern country, & yet Americans are remarkably uncomfortable around one another, because we’re too aware that we remain mostly strangers. Being middle class makes us more or less the same, but that doesn’t necessarily bring us together. That takes something else—perhaps it takes charity.
There is a movie all about this moral drama, Planes, Trains, & Automobiles, made by John Hughes in 1988, starring Steve Martin & John Candy as two middle-aged men who come together by accident while traveling, going home for the holidays. Martin plays a successful middle-class man with a lovely family, the kind of man who would never watch John Hughes movies, which were mostly about kids. He fails to close a sale in New York & hurries to make a plane bound for Chicago—that as much as seals his fate.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Some of Candy's best stuff was for Second City, but this performance is up there! Fine piece also, Titus--Happy Thanksgiving.
Agreed!
Happy Thanksgiving, Carl!