Writer/director John Hughes had had a series of successful movies in the eighties featuring teenage angst and adventures (Weird Science, Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) when he embarked on this, the more grown-up movie, Planes, Trains and Automobiles. It’s a comedy, and it is indeed packed with comic set pieces, but it’s a lot more than that: it has a genuine pathos and poignancy.
Inspired by an actual hellish trip that Hughes had personally experienced, in which various delays and diversions had kept him from getting home for an entire weekend, Hughes apparently wrote the first sixty pages of the script in just six hours. Steve Martin plays Neal Page, a marketing executive desperate to get back home to Chicago to see his wife and kids for Thanksgiving, and who along the way becomes saddled with shower curtain ring salesman Del Griffith (John Candy). Mishaps befall the two throughout their travels, and they endure every indignity that modern travel can inflict on its victims.
The success of the movie is founded on the essential natures of its two principal actors: Steve Martin and John Candy embody themselves, and this is key to why the film is able to reveal so much heart and truth. Neal spends the movie trying to peel off from Del, whilst Del spends the movie having his feelings hurt and then coming through for Neal anyway. It is road trip and buddy movie rolled into one, done to highly comedic effect, and my family returns to it time after time.
The last scenes of the movie deliver the emotional payoff we have been half-expecting all along. Neal undergoes a kind of moral rebirth: we know he has learned a valuable lesson about empathy, and there is true poignancy in the scene where Neal finds Del waiting alone on the L platform. Incidentally, there is a moment just before this scene where Neal, on the train home before he returns to find Del, starts to laugh quietly to himself as he recalls their misadventures. It’s wonderfully natural and it turns out that there was good reason for that: unbeknownst to Steve Martin, Hughes had kept the cameras rolling in between takes on the Chicago train, while Martin was thinking about his next lines, and in so doing captured this unguarded moment. I include it, along with a few of the other great scenes in the two-part montage below.
