by Roger Ebert
Eduardo runs the family grocery store or bodega, an anchor of the neighborhood. He has long dreamed of a son taking it over, but this does not seem to be. Anna has long yearned for a grandchild, and regards Sarah as if hinting that a joyous announcement only would be polite. Anna and Eduardo are undergoing great unhappiness in their marriage; it’s always a danger signal when someone leaves the room to take a cell call. But find out about that for yourself. The big issue that Eduardo and Anna share publicly is her desire to get rid of the sick old tree in the middle of the lawn, and his reluctance to commence this family duty, or much of any other, on Christmas Eve.
The performers breathe real life into the characters, starting with Elizabeth Pena and Alfred Molina. Leguizamo is more pensive than we’re used to. The actors are good at something that seems almost impossible, all talking at high energy and interrupting one another, as if they really have known one another very well for a long time. This cannot come easily and may take more of a knack than heavy drama.
The story unspools, the threads sometimes tangling, as many a family reunion movie has before this one. “A Puerto Rican family,” writes one of the fanboys on IMDb. “Dear God, I hate those movies.” He is open-minded: “All these movies with ethnic families (Italians, Greeks, Puerto Ricans, etc. etc.), they all suck.” Do you have the feeling he’s living in the wrong country? Another deep thinker on the same board writes, “Debra Messing = Puerto Rican??” No, but then she doesn’t play one. For that matter, several members of the cast are not of Puerto Rican descent, but you know what? They’re actors. And the story is familiar to their experience not because they’re mostly Latino but because they’re human and have families.
That’s the point of this movie. If you could be the invisible Ghost of Christmas Present in the Rodriguez house, what would you see? If you’ve been lucky, you’d see memories of your own family holidays. There’s nothing magic about being Puerto Rican. I could not only identify with but recognize every experience this family has. To a necessary degree the screenplay by Alison Swan and Rick Najera follows familiar formulas. But then the dialogue, the specifics, and especially the acting take charge, and the movie becomes funny, sad, corny, romantic, heartfelt, all when it needs to be.
One of the most touching moments occurs between Anna and Sarah, who had not expected to get along very well this holiday. Sarah plays a Jewish woman who doesn’t know from this Puerto Rican Christmas. She doesn’t want to look like a snob, but she’s from a different background, and that’s also how Anna sees her. But what with one thing and another, Sarah starts to love the family, and Anna starts to love her. You know, Anna informs her quietly, there are some very fine Jewish Puerto Ricans.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
R, 93 m., 1987
Steve Martin (Neal Page), John Candy (Del Griffith). Directed, produced, and written by John Hughes.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles is founded on the essential natures of its actors. It is perfectly cast and soundly constructed, and all else flows naturally. Steve Martin and John Candy don’t play characters; they embody themselves. That’s why the comedy, which begins securely planted in the twin genres of the road movie and the buddy picture, is able to reveal so much heart and truth.
Some movies are obviously great. Others gradually thrust their greatness upon us. When Planes, Trains and Automobiles was released in 1987, I enjoyed it immensely, gave it a favorable review and moved on. But the movie continued to live in my memory. Like certain other popular entertainments (It’s a Wonderful Life, E.T., Casablanca) it not only contained a universal theme, but also matched it with the right actors and story, so that it shrugged off the other movies of its kind and stood above them in a kind of perfection. This is the only movie our family watches as a custom, most every Thanksgiving.
The story is familiar. Steve Martin plays Neal, a Chicago advertising man, sleek in impeccable blues and grays, smooth-shaven, recently barbered, reeking of self-confidence, prosperity, and anal-retentiveness. John Candy plays Del, a traveling salesman from Chicago who sells shower curtain rings (“the best in the world”). He is very tall, very large, and covered in layers of mismatched shirts, sweaters, vests, sport coats, and parkas. His bristly little mustache looks like it was stuck on crooked just before his entrance; his bow tie is also askew.
Both of these men are in Manhattan two days before Thanksgiving, and both want to get home for the holidays. Fate joins their destinies. Together they will endure every indignity that modern travel can inflict on its victims. What will torture them even more is being trapped in each other’s company. Del wants only to please. Neal wants only to be left alone.
John Hughes, who wrote, directed, and produced the film, is one of the most prolific filmmakers of the last twenty-five years. He is not often cited for greatness, although some of his titles, like The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Home Alone, have fervent admirers. What can be said for him is that he usually produces a real story about people he has clear ideas about; his many teenage comedies, for example, are miles more inventive than the recent sex-and-prom sagas. The buried story engine of Planes, Trains and Automobiles is not slowly growing friendship or odd-couple hostility (devices a lesser film might have employed), but empathy. It is about understanding how the other guy feels.
Del, we feel, was born with empathy. He instinctively identifies with Neal’s problems. He is genuinely sorry to learn he stole his cab. He is quick to offer help when their flight is diverted to Wichita, Kansas, and there are no hotel rooms available. Neal, on the other hand, depends on his credit cards and self-reliance. He wants to make his own plans, book his own room, rent his own car. He spends the movie trying to peel off from Del, and failing; Del spends the movie having his feelings hurt and then coming through for Neal anyway.
The movie could have been a shouting match like the unfortunate Odd Couple 2 (1998). Hughes is more subtle. The key early scene takes place in the Wichita motel room they have to share, when Neal explodes, telling Del his jokes stink, his stories are not interesting, and he would rather sit through an insurance seminar than listen to any more of the fat man’s pointless anecdotes. Look at Candy’s face fall. He shows Del as a man hurt and saddened—and not for the first time. Later he remembers how the most important person in his life once told him he was too eager to please, and shouldn’t always try so hard.
At this point, Del wins our hearts, and the movie is set up as more than a comedy. But a comedy it is. Not one movie a year contributes a catchphrase to the language. We remember Jack Nicholson ordering the toast. “If you build it, they will come.” “E.T., phone home.” “I’m walkin’ here!” “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” “Are you talking to me?”
And we remember the scene where Del and Neal wake up cuddled together in the cramped motel bed, and Neal asks Del where his hand is, and Del said it’s between some pillows, and Neal says, “Those aren’t pillows,” and the two men bolt out of bed in terror, and Neal shouts, “You see that Bears game last week?” and Del cries, “What a game! What a game! Bears gonna go all the way!” This is not homophobia but the natural reaction of two men raised to be shy and distant around other men—to fear misunderstood intimacy.
The other great comic set piece in the movie is responsible for its R rating; nothing else in the movie would qualify for other than PG-13. This is Neal’s verbal symphony for the f-word, performed by the desperate man after a rental-car bus strands him three miles from the terminal without a car. He has to walk back through the snow and mud, crossing runways, falling down embankments, until he finally faces a chirpy rental agent (Edie McClurg) who is chatting on the phone about the need for tiny marshmallows in the ambrosia. When she sweetly asks Neal if he is disturbed, he unleashes a speech in which the adjectival form of the f-word supplies the prelude to every noun, including itself, and is additionally used as punctuation. When he finishes, the clerk has a two-word answer that supplies one of the great moments in m
ovie dialogue.
Neal is uneasy around ordinary people and in unstructured situations. His mind is organized like a Day-Timer. He’s lived in a cocoon of affluence and lacks a common touch. Consider the scene on the bus where Del suggests a sing-along, and Neal, awkwardly trying to be a good sport, begins “Three Coins in a Fountain” (and doesn’t know the words). His fellow passengers look at him like he’s crazy. Del saves the moment with a boisterous rendition of a song everybody except Neal knows: “Meet the Flintstones!”
The last scenes of the movie carry the emotional payoff we have been half-awaiting all along. For Neal, they reflect a kind of moral rebirth such as Scrooge experiences in another great holiday tale: He has learned his lesson, and will no longer judge people by their appearances, or by his own selfish standards. There is true poignancy in the scene where Neal finds Del waiting alone on the L platform.
One night a few years after Planes, Trains and Automobiles was released, I came upon John Candy (1950–1994) sitting all by himself in a hotel bar in New York, smoking and drinking, and we talked for a while. We were going to be on the same TV show the next day. He was depressed. People loved him, but he didn’t seem to know that, or it wasn’t enough. He was a sweet guy and nobody had a word to say against him, but he was down on himself. All he wanted to do was make people laugh, but sometimes he tried too hard, and he hated himself for doing that in some of his movies. I thought of Del. There is so much truth in the role that it transforms the whole movie. Hughes knew it, and captured it again in Only the Lonely (1991). And Steve Martin knew it, and played straight to it.
The movies that last, the ones we return to, don’t always have lofty themes or Byzantine complexities. Sometimes they last because they are arrows straight to the heart. When Neal unleashes that tirade in the motel room and Del’s face saddens, he says, “Oh. I see.” It is a moment that not only defines Del’s life, but is a turning point in Neal’s, because he also is a lonely soul, and too well organized to know it. Strange, how much poignancy creeps into this comedy, and only becomes stronger while we’re laughing.
The Polar Express
G, 100 m., 2004
Body movement performers: Tom Hanks (Hero Boy / Father / Conductor / Hobo / Scrooge/Santa), Michael Jeter (Smokey / Steamer), Nona Gaye (Hero Girl), Peter Scolari (Lonely Boy), Eddie Deezen (Know-It-All), Charles Fleischer (Elf General), Steven Tyler (Elf Lieutenant / Elf Singer), Leslie Zemeckis (Sister Sarah / Mother). Voice performers if different than above: Daryl Sabara (Hero Boy), Andre Sogliuzzo (Smokey / Steamer), Jimmy Bennett (Lonely Boy), Isabella Peregrina (Sister Sarah). Directed by Robert Zemeckis and produced by Zemeckis, Gary Goetzman, Steve Starkey, and William Teitler. Screenplay by Zemeckis and William Broyles, Jr., based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg.
The Polar Express has the quality of a lot of lasting children’s entertainment: It’s a little creepy. Not creepy in an unpleasant way, but in that sneaky, teasing way that lets you know eerie things could happen. There’s a deeper, shivery tone, instead of the mindless jolliness of the usual Christmas movie. This one creates a world of its own, like The Wizard of Oz or Willy Wonka, in which the wise child does not feel too complacent.
Those who know the Chris Van Allsburg book will feel right at home from the opening moments, which quote from the story: On Christmas Eve, many years ago, I lay quietly in my bed. . . . The young hero, who is never given a name, is listening for the sound of sleigh bells ringing. He is at just the age when the existence of Santa Claus is up for discussion.
The look of the film is extraordinary, a cross between live action and Van Allsburg’s artwork. Robert Zemeckis, the same director whose Who Framed Roger Rabbit juxtaposed live action with animation, this time merges them, using a process called “performance capture,” in which human actors perform the movements that are translated into lifelike animation. The characters in The Polar Express don’t look real, but they don’t look unreal, either; they have a kind of simplified and underlined reality that makes them visually magnetic. Many of the body and voice performances are by Tom Hanks, who is the executive producer and worked with Zemeckis on Forrest Gump (1994) —another film that combined levels of reality and special effects.
The story: As Hero Boy lies awake in bed, there is a rumble in the street and a passenger train lumbers into view. The boy runs outside in his bathrobe and slippers, and the conductor advises him to get onboard. Having refused to visit a department store Santa, having let his little sister put out Santa’s milk and cookies, Hero Boy is growing alarmingly agnostic on the Santa question, and The Polar Express apparently shuttles such kids to the North Pole, where seeing is believing.
Already on board is Hero Girl, a solemn and gentle African-American, who becomes the boy’s friend, and also befriends Lonely Boy, who lives on the wrong side of the tracks and always seems sad. Another character, Know-It-All, is one of those kids who can’t supply an answer without sounding obnoxious about it. These four are the main characters, in addition to the conductor, a hobo who lives on top of the train, Santa, and countless elves.
There’s an interesting disconnect between the movie’s action and its story. The action is typical thrill-ride stuff, with The Polar Express careening down a “179-degree grade” and racing through tunnels with a half-inch of clearance, while Hero Boy and the hobo ski the top of the train to find safety before the tunnel. At the North Pole, there’s another dizzying ride when the kids spin down a corkscrewing toy chute.
Those scenes are skillful, but expected. Not expected is a dazzling level of creativity in certain other scenes. Hero Girl’s lost ticket, for example, flutters through the air with as much freedom as the famous floating feather at the start of Forrest Gump. When hot chocolate is served on the train, dancing waiters materialize with an acrobatic song and dance. And the North Pole looks like a turn-of-the-century German factory town, filled with elves who not only look mass-produced but may have been, since they mostly have exactly the same features (this is not a cost-cutting device, but an artistic decision).
Santa, in this version, is a good and decent man, matter-of-fact and serious: a professional man, doing his job. The elves are like the crowd at a political rally. A sequence involving a bag full of toys is seen from a high angle that dramatizes Santa’s operation but doesn’t romanticize it; this is not Jolly St. Nick, but Claus, Inc. There is indeed something a little scary about all those elves with their intense, angular faces and their mob mentality.
That’s the magic of The Polar Express: It doesn’t let us off the hook with the usual reassuring Santa and Christmas clichés. When a helicopter lifts the bag of toys over the town square, of course it knocks a star off the top of the Christmas tree, and of course an elf is almost skewered far below. When Santa’s helpers hitch up the reindeer, they look not like tame cartoon characters, but like skittish purebreds. And as for Lonely Boy, although he does make the trip and get his present, and is fiercely protective of it, at the end of the movie we suspect his troubles are not over, and that loneliness may be his condition.
There are so many jobs and so many credits on this movie that I don’t know who to praise, but there are sequences here that are really very special. Some are quiet little moments, like a reflection in a hubcap. Some are visual masterstrokes, like a point of view that looks straight up through a printed page, with the letters floating between us and the reader. Some are story concepts, like the train car filled with old and dead toys being taken back to the Pole for recycling. Some are elements of mystery, like the character of the hobo, who is helpful and even saves Hero Boy’s life but is in a world of his own up there on top of the train and doesn’t become anybody’s buddy (when he disappears, his hand always lingers a little longer than his body).
The Polar Express is a movie for more than one season; it will become a perennial, shared by the generations. It has a haunting magical quality because it has imagined its world freshly and played true to it, sidestepping all the tiresome Christmas clichés that children
have inflicted on them this time of year. The conductor tells Hero Boy he thinks he really should get on the train, and I have the same advice for you.
Prancer
G, 102 m., 1989
Sam Elliott (John Riggs), Rebecca Harrell (Jessica Riggs), Cloris Leachman (Mrs. McFarland), Rutanya Alda (Aunt Sarah), John Joseph Duda (Steve Riggs), Abe Vigoda (Orel Benton), Boo (Prancer). Directed By John Hancock. Produced by Raffaella De Laurentiis. Screenplay by Greg Taylor.
Every once in a while you meet a kid like Jessica, who is tough and resilient and yet hangs onto her dreams.
She’s a nine-year-old who still believes in Santa Claus, and uses logic to defend her position: If there isn’t a Santa, then maybe there isn’t a God, and if there isn’t a God, then there isn’t a heaven, and, in that case, where did Jessica’s mother go when she died? Jessica lives with her dad and brother on a small farm outside Three Oaks, Michigan. Her dad grows apples and is struggling to make ends meet. He may have to sell the tractor. “Will we have enough to eat?” she asks him. “Sure,” he says. “We’ll have apple sauce, apple juice, stewed apples, apple pie, baked apples. . . .“ One day while she’s walking down the main street on her way home from school, Jessica witnesses a disturbing accident: One of Santa’s reindeers falls down from a holiday decoration strung up across the street. It’s Prancer, the third in line.
Nobody seems to care much about the injured decoration, which is cleared from the road. But not long after, walking home alone through the frosty woods on a cold night, Jessica comes across a reindeer with an injured leg. It stands unafraid in a moonlit clearing and seems to be asking for help. Not long after, her dad comes along in his pickup, and then they both see the deer in the road. Her dad sees that it has a bad leg and wants to shoot it, but then the reindeer disappears. And when it turns up again in the barn, Jessica hides it in an out-building and brings it Christmas cookies to eat. She wants to nurse Prancer back to health and return him to Santa.
