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When movie families take to the road, they never have
a good time. The trip usually brings out the worst behavior in everyone.
The recent indie hit and Best Picture nominee Little
Miss Sunshine is a shining example. Olive
(Abigail Breslin) freaks out when she receives a call telling her that she
has qualified for the Little Miss Sunshine contest. Her
entire family of argumentative and quirky individuals piles into a
broken-down VW bus and heads off to the obscene pageant that exploits young
girls. The filmmakers wisely mock this spectacle while creating a uniquely
idiosyncratic movie family. All the performances are impeccable, and the
recurring image of the family pushing the bus is one for
the ages.
Perhaps the quintessential road family is the Joads
of The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Director John Ford took a break from Westerns to
film John Steinbeck’s tale of a Depression-era family forced to leave
the Dust Bowl to start a new life in California. Ford’s film version
is more histrionic than historic, relying too heavily on melodramatic
speeches, and a bit more realism would have been welcome.
The bank-robbing exploits of Clyde (Warren Beatty)
and Buck Barrow (Gene Hackman) and their women, Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) and
Blanche (Estelle Parsons), were heavily fictionalized in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), but that
didn’t hinder the impact of this groundbreaking film. Director Arthur
Penn takes a darker and more satiric look at the Depression, and he turned
the American cinema on its ear in the process. Bonnie and Clyde still ranks as
one of the greatest films ever made.
National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) moved the genre to its now-standard comedy format. Clark
Griswold (Chevy Chase) takes his family across the country to the Wally
World theme park, encountering mishaps along the way. Chase is an expert at
this brand of comedy. Why did his career collapse so quickly? Vacation is the best film to
carry the National Lampoon moniker.
More recently, in RV (2006), Robin Williams coerced his family to hit the road,
in a giant recreational vehicle, for a vacation to the
Rockies. The humor relies heavily on slapstick, but every now and then a
bit generates a laugh. Flirting
with Disaster (1996) was completely overlooked
by the Oscars, but it remains the best comedy of its kind. Ben Stiller
decides to find his birth parents, and he drags his family and a caseworker
from the adoption agency along for the ride. Most comedies run out of gas
long before the ending credits, but David O. Russell’s underrated gem
gathers momentum as the journey progresses.
New on DVD this Tuesday (March 27): Happy Feet, The Pursuit of Happyness, Turistas, and Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj.
New on DVD this Tuesday (March 27): Happy Feet, The Pursuit of Happyness, Turistas, and Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj.
