The Thanksgiving Theme

While there are many holiday movies with Christmas as their theme, and more produced every year, the Thanksgiving theme has only generated one or two films. The family favorite (though not necessarily family-friendly) Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is the first that comes to mind. Steve Martin's torturous journey home from a business meeting with ne'er-do-well John Candy is famously funny. It captures the "everything that can go wrong, will" of traveling as well as the yearning for family and home we all experience once in a while. The late John Candy is the best part of this movie. A seemingly true loser, we all run into guys like this who perpetually and unknowingly create problems for the rest of us smart, successful types. We all identify with Steve Martin's buttoned-up businessman, but you have to wonder: are you the John Candy-esque troublemaker for some family member or co-worker?

Another true loser was the Holly Hunter movie Home for the Holidays. Holly Hunter's character travels home to her dysfunctional family for Thanksgiving, running into all the old craziness of parents and squabbling siblings. But most of these "all families are crazy" movies reveal that there really is love and closeness underneath all the mess. Not this one. All the mean-spirited antics and teasing in this movie leave you disliking the family as much as they dislike each other. And this just adds more fuel to the Hollywood fire that home and family are dreadful traps.

Which leads us to Woody Allen's Thanksgiving-themed film, Hannah and Her Sisters. With all the craziness of your typical New York family, this movie is rife with adultery, infertility, and catered cocktail parties. Actually, this is a funny, charming movie with Allen's trademark touches ridiculing modern art, rock music, and passive-aggressive wives. But as with all of Allen's movies, love isn't true love without illicit sex. Eventually the characters in this movie do come to grasp what the rest of us know: physical passion is all-encompassing for a while, but it won't get you to "happily ever after." In this film, as the family gathers for Thanksgiving, Michael Caine, the narrator, sees how family and home bring much more profound happiness.