[7.8/10] *Planes, Trains and Automobiles* shouldn't work. It tries to mix some of the looniest, most over-the-top comedy you’ve ever seen, with genuine heart and authentic, revealing human interactions. It wants to smush together a Bert and Ernie routine spackled with zany slapstick comedy, and yet draw back to enough real emotion and camaraderie to make the holiday turkey go down easy. It is a mesh of extremes that, by all accounts, shouldn't fit together.

But it does thanks to two simple, marvelous words: John Candy.

I don’t want to minimize the contributions of the rest of the creative team. Writer-director-producer John Hughes obviously deserves credit for a product with so many of his fingerprints on it. Steve Martin plays an everyman at his wits end who holds up his side of the bargain. And the supporting cast is chock full of more talented character actors than you can shake a stick at. It takes a village to make a good movie, and *Planes, Trains* can boast the contributions of plenty of talents in front of and behind the camera.

But if there’s a single performer who exemplifies the nigh-miraculous balancing act that this movie pulls off, it’s the man who plays Del Griffith, American Light and Fixture, Director of Sales, Shower Curtain Ring Division. As he so often is, he’s called upon to play the clown in scads of moments across the film. He has to be comically oblivious, ludicrously chipper, goofy enough to pantomime Ray Charles while driving, cackle like the devil when sideswiped by two big rigs at once, wheeze, flail, and bumble his way through the whole movie. And as always, he does it all with flying colors.

But he is also called upon to bring an authenticity to someone who seems relentlessly upbeat in the face of setback after setback. He has to make someone who seems endlessly giving to a traveling companion who doesn't deserve it seem plausible. And most of all, he has to subtly convey a soul in mourning -- a man who, beneath all his optimism and sunshine, is a wounded dove looking for a friend.

That is, perhaps, not what Candy is remembered for. WIth his crack comic timing and slate of uproarious roles, you could be forgiven for thinking of him chiefly as a jokester extraordinaire. But when he endures Neal Page’s demeaning rant and looks like a scolded puppy only to defend his right to be himself, when he confides in his dead wife about coming on too strong, when he admits to his forced-by-fate roadtrip buddy that he has no home, Candy reveals himself as an actor who can break your heart and stitch it back together like no other.

Without a performer of his caliber, the film could not pack nearly the same emotional punch, but it might still be fun. There is an amusing and relatable progression to *Planes, Trains and Automobiles*. Hughes and company stack transit misfortune on top of transit misfortune, packing together every mishap and malady on the road that one can imagine. The film starts with the germ of something relatable, and then exaggerates it one notch, then another, and another and another until the worst travel day of your life seems like a dream by comparison.

That too is a tricky balance, one that Hughes and his team do not master in quite the same way. In truth, there’s a point at the two-thirds mark of the film where Del and Neal are obliviously trucking on the wrong side of the highway, inadvertently setting beat up cars ablaze, and crashing backwards through motel rooms where the film stops being a caricatured but recognizable travelogue and starts becoming a live action Looney Tunes cartoon.

Yet, at its best, *Planes, Trains* traffics in the idea of something everyone’s experienced once, extended just beyond the bounds of reality for cinematic and comic effect. And most of the time, it works! Travel woes may not be exactly the same now as they were in 1987. (It’s telling how often a combination of cell phones, ubiquitous payment-by-card, and the internet could have at least softened Neal and Del’s falls.) But everyone’s suffered from flight delays, rental car misfortunes, and irksome fellow travelers. Hughes may take things to an extreme, but when the film is hitting, you feel the real pain at the core of these wacky situations, because you’ve probably felt it too at some point in your life.

Much of that owes to the construction of Martin’s character. In some ways, he’s a cipher, there to be the audience’s avatar for what it would be like to suffer every trip-related catastrophe imaginable, and have to deal with every creature discomfort in the process. Martin can overplay certain scenes, but when he’s dialed in, his droll, defeated, and oft-incredulous reactions to the latest indignity help put the viewer in his shoes and feel the misfortune of all of this.

But he and Del also have to be foils for one another, a pairing that can sustain the movie through each reversal and set piece, which isn’t easy. Just as Candy has to play someone who is, by all rights, pretty annoying, but someone who you can't stay mad at because at heart, he’s just a big teddy bear, Martin has to play someone who is, by all rights, entirely justified in being irritated and irascible given all that he endures over the course of his journey from New York City to Chicago for the holidays, but who seems just uptight and unreasonable enough that we both chuckle at his snippets of comeuppance and implicitly scold him when he has the temerity to be even the slightest bit rude to Del.

Those character dynamics take fine-tuning. And again, sometimes the situation gets so outrageous, the two of them lose their tether to reality, and it’s hard to buy the truth of the situation. (The ample use of a score that could stun a yak with its 1980s synthesized awfulness doesn’t help on that front.) And yet, even there, in the moments where Neal is at his worst, or Hughes turns the zaniness up to eleven, he and his actors almost always remember to pull back and give us something to remind us of the shared humanity of these two woebegotten souls.

Del gives his iconic “I like me” speech, and Neal crumples from his high dudgeon into a rueful resignation. Neal says a deliberate goodbye after the pair manage to secure a couple of separate train tickets, seemingly glad to be rid of his insistent helper, only to shuffle through a field to help Del carry his trunk when it breaks down. There are insults, curse words, and even the odd fist to the guy. But there is also a kind of shared mad laughter, a fire-forged friendship, and moments of kindness that cut through both the frustrated callousness and the film’s most high volume moments.

None more so than the moment when Del and Neal are just laughing it up together in their final motel stop. The scene comes smack dab in the middle of some of the film’s most absurd set pieces. Still, somehow, through the magic of two performers’ chemistry and a willingness to touch down even when the movie’s tone is flying high, a vignette of real friendship emerges. Somewhere in a carousel of mini-liquor bottles and cheap snacks, two pals laugh and rib each other and toast to the good, is a way that is both recognizable and heartwarming.

It’s why, for my money, *Planes, Trains and Automobiles* is *the* Thanksgiving movie. The filmmakers manage to capture the spate of travel headaches that so many of us experience when reaching family and friends this time of year. It’s founded on a yearning to get home and be there for loved ones that's baked into the holiday. And it elicits countless laughs by poking great fun at the hurdles, large and small, that often fall in our paths on our way to celebrating.

But it is, at its core, also a movie about being thankful for what you have. Neal Page is ready to curse the world for his misfortune, snakebitten enough to end up with every trip-related pitfalls you could imagine. And worse yet, he has to spend it with the world’s most obnoxious man to add insult to injury.

Only, that man has lost something Neal takes for granted. Whatever the world may throw at him, he has a wife, a family, a place to go on Thanksgiving -- precious things that Del has been bereft of for eight lonely years. Tumbling into an overpass, watching your car melt, and being stranded hundreds of miles from home is nothing to sneeze at. But seeing someone who would cherish what you have, and is full of the grace and goodness to do everything in their power to get you back to it, is as potent a reminder to count your blessings as there could be.

And though the true history of the holiday is, at best, a checkered one, the mythologized version of the historical events carries a venerable moral -- that great things can come when you welcome someone new and different to your table. There is a profound kindness in Neal sharing his bounty, not in roast turkey and harvest vegetables, but in love and friendship, to someone who tried to offer him the same in hard times.

That is a grand, profound thing to try to stuff into a film founded on rapid-fire F-bombs and frozen attack dogs popping out of pickup truck hay. But with a talent like John Candy, a devotion to finding the humanity amid the maddening and absurd, and a barrel of laughs to help it all go down, *Planes, Trains and Automobiles* gets you where you want to go.