National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation

Looking for something festive to watch last night, I found that I could get National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, which I've always enjoyed, so I took another look. It still holds up, mostly because the humor is never particularly aggressive, and the movie has a heart without being maudlin.

Released in 1989, it was the third in the "Vacation" series featuring the all-American Griswold family. It was written by John Hughes, based on his story "Christmas '59" from National Lampoon, and directed by Jeremiah Chechik.

The over-riding theme of the movie is that the dad, played with the usual obtuseness by Chevy Chase, wants to have the perfect family Christmas. He wants the best light display, the best dinner, the fastest sled, the perfect tree. Of course in each of these endeavors he fails miserably, with mishaps wreaking havoc on the house. I think there's a message in there somewhere that makes some sense--Christmas is about the little things.

The film has lots of layers. We have some subplots that have varying success. I kind of liked the yuppie neighbors (Nicholas Guest and Julia Louis-Dreyfuss), who are victims of Chase's mishaps (Louis-Dreyfuss ends up being attacked by a squirrel and a dog). I also liked Eddie (the scene-stealing Randy Quaid) who arrives by RV with his wife, two children, and a slobbering dog. He's a kind of white-trash white knight, and when Chase describes him as having "a heart bigger than his brain" he takes this as a compliment.

The film goes a little off the rails with the subplot involving Chase waiting for his Christmas bonus, which he needs to cover a deposit check for a swimming pool. When he gets a membership in the Jelly of the Month Club instead, Quaid takes it upon himself to kidnap the boss (a properly bumptious Brian Doyle Murray), and everything turns out all right. I find it interesting to compare that time to this, because I don't think many people are getting Christmas bonuses any more (if they have jobs), so the whole idea seems too farcical now.

There are simple pleasures to the film, mostly involving good old-fashioned slapstick, such as Chase being hit in the face by boards, or the scene in which the guests chew down on extremely dry turkey. Most of the gags involving the ancient aunt and uncle (William Hickey and Mae Questel) are good, such as when she is asked to say Grace and recites the Pledge of Allegiance, or when he tells her that she "couldn't hear a dump truck going through a nitroglycerin factory."

The script seems to have one hand tied behind its back, maybe to keep a PG rating, and maybe because Hughes just didn't want to be too scabrous in a Christmas movie (that was taken care of in Bad Santa). As such, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is a fairly funny family film that has earned its place in the canon of Christmas standards.