EVERYTIME YOU GO AWAY

Well, it's Thanksgiving Day in America, and stuck on the other side of the Atlantic, we find ourselves far from any cheer as the country seems to be nosediving into a deep chasm—much like the one in the Mines of Moria where Gandalf battles the Balrog after breaking the bridge of Khazad-dûm.

So while we face our Balrog-battling era here in the United Kingdom, our American cousins will no doubt be tearing into their Thanksgiving turkeys—probably relieved they didn’t end up with Kamala Harris as President. Judging from her recent video address, it looks like she’s been hitting the bottle hard since her comprehensive defeat in the 2024 election.

Now, I won’t pretend to know too much about Thanksgiving as a tradition, except that it inspired one of the greatest American comedies of all time: Planes, Trains and Automobiles, written by the genius John Hughes. Hughes, of course, is also responsible for such classics as The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Home Alone 1 and 2 and had a unique knack for capturing many facets of the American (mostly middle class) psyche in the 1980s. I'm also convinced if he hadn't been a screenwriter/director he would have made a great author, so brilliant are his observations of character and culture at that time.

Certainly, I’ve often thought about how much the late directors Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, and Preston Sturges would have loved Hughes’ odd-couple movie, set around Thanksgiving. In it, Neal Page (Steve Martin) and Del Griffith (John Candy) desperately try to get back home via various methods of public transportation for the holiday season, as tensions rise between the two men from markedly different backgrounds.

Without spoiling it for those who haven’t seen it, I can only say that the conclusion of the movie is one of the most emotionally satisfying endings in the history of film comedies, made even more poignant by the fact that John Candy passed away seven years later. Somehow, his portrayal of travelling salesman Del remains his most enduring legacy, capturing both the undefeated optimism of a man selling shower curtain rings and the quiet tragedy of his life spent perpetually on the road in lonely motels and empty train stations.

There's a bit of Del in all of us, I feel.

Happy Thanksgiving!