You remember the last time you traveled and your neighbour for the journey just wouldn’t stop eating? Or the time when the hair oil raised such a stink that you thought you were dead and in hell? Or what about the time when those noisy kids scampering around, screaming at top of their voices made sleep a distant dream and a waking nightmare? Before you start reliving those horrors, let me just take you through a roller coaster journey of Steve Martin and John Candy in this super movie called Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which might just make you smile about all those times (you know how someone else’s misery can be kisi aur ki masti?).
Neal Page (Steve Martin) wants to go home for Thanksgiving dinner with his family. Trying to get a cab during peak hours on mean New York streets to reach the airport, his hard earned cab is taken away by someone else. Neal does manage to reach the airport but the flight is delayed. In comes Del Griffith (John Candy) a rotund blabbermouth who just can’t stop talking. Needless to say, this is the gentleman who has unwittingly zoomed away in Page’s cab. Starting then, their fates are tied for the rest of journey, to the glee of one and dismay of another.
After snubbing golu Griffith, Neal looks forward to quiet and quick trip back home to Chicago, when he realizes that flight being over booked, his business class ticket is useless and that he has to fly in economy class. And his neighbour is the snubbed man whose jovial face and ever ready smile irritates Page to no end. Starting then, their fates are tied for the rest of journey, to the glee of one and dismay of another.
The flight, due to bad weather is rerouted to Wichita and shows no signs of ever leaving from there. DG offers NP to get him a hotel room, if he would pay the cab fare. After this ride, there is no looking back as they plod their way through car that bursts into flames, busload of people who burst thankfully just in a song and a train journey that finally takes them home.
The two guys are poles apart. NP is a hi flying exec who wears expensive suits and never eats with his mouth open where as DG is a happy go lucky sales guy who is proud of his company that makes superior quality shower curtain rings(have you noticed how we never wonder who makes some things, like curtain rings?).
The movie is full of situations that make you laugh out loud and some that bring a quiet smile of satisfaction on your face. Some of the funniest moments are when NP and DG wake up to find they have been sleeping as a cuddling twosome or the scene where NP, upset with everything that’s going wrong with him picks on fight with the attendant at a car rental. He uses the F word with such genuine feeling till he is shut up for good!
The scene where NP blasts DG for being a loud mouth, the growing hurt in DGs eyes, till he tell him that he likes himself the way he is one of the genuinely touching moments in the movie.
The end is, yes happy, though not saccharine sweet, a bit unexpected, but something that puts a tearful smile on your face. There is no moral lesson in the movie, but just that friendship can bloom just about anywhere… it’s just a matter of sometimes opening your heart and home to a stranger and believe in inherent goodness of people.
It’s a movie I have watched umpteen number of times and never gotten bored. The performances by Steve Martin and especially John Candy are nothing short of perfect. It is them, who as people poles apart make every scene in this movie fantastic.
A must watch for poora khaandaan on that lazy afternoon and feel the warm glow of having people who love you around you!