Ramis: National Lampoon's Vacation (1983)

For anyone interested in the tone and texture of middle America in the mid-80s, it’s hard to beat National Lampoon’s Vacation, the first and funniest adventure with the Griswolds, an all-American family who embark on a road trip from the Chicago suburbs to California to visit Walley World, a loose version of Disneyland, the destination of John Hughes’ short story Vacation ’58, which formed the basis of his screenplay. At the head of the family is Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase), followed closely by Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo), their children Rusty (Anthony Michael Hall) and Audrey (Dana Barron) and a whole host of family members, friends and locals they meet along the way, most memorably Ellen’s cousin Eddie (Randy Quaid) and his daughter, Vicki, played by a very young Jane Krakoswki. By far the most mobile of the Vacation series, the action rarely stays in one place for very long, as the Griswolds move from attraction to attraction, in what often feels like a paean to roadside America, a vanishing heartland that’s captured in a series of beautiful, breathtaking aerial shots of highways, usually as they detour and loop around cities, paving the way for the incredible roller coaster sequences that ensue once the family arrive at Walley World and find they have the park to themselves. Of course, that also means that we don’t actually see many cities, since this is the kind of family who’ve spent their whole life avoiding actual urban cores, even or especially when they’re traversing the entire country, carrying a suburban lens with them wherever they go, which colours the entire film in turn with a pastel postcard palette, attuned to the minutiae of motor courts, drive-in diners, gas stations and campsides, as well as  a correspondingly mild, gentle comic style that makes the more audacious moments feel even more perfectly and shocking pitched by comparison. In large part, that’s down to Chase – after Caddyshack, this is the role that really defined his comic style – who puts in a performance of such self-effacing mildness that his sliminess really takes you by surprise, seduces you before you even know what’s happened, with the same implausibility that conjures up Christie Brinkley in every other scene as a fantasy he can’t quite be bothered to pursue. Modern fratcoms are so dominated by manchildren, sex addicts and self-referential bromancers that it’s quite striking to encounter a comedian who’s so normal, so vanilla, so whitewashed in his sliminess, as well as so obliviously, complacently and kind of lazily content, for the most part, with his role as nuclear family patriarch, which in Chase’s hands feels more viscerally and skin-tinglingly creepy that the most ostensibly outrageous of contemporary comedians. Discovering perverseness in mildness was his particular gift – he barely ever changes the tone, volume or inflection of his voice – a gift that he extends to his whole family here, who are totally twisted, but in a surprisingly mild, manageable kind of way that makes watching the film a kind of sublimation, a continual – imperfect – forgetting of how screwed up it all really is. In recent years, there’s been a move towards recreating the Vacation spirit, firstly with films like We’re The Millers and then with the actual Vacation remake, but watching the original is to bask in a calm that is perhaps not possible to really capture again in such a frenzied, post-cinematic environment, at least not as oddly, obliviously and perfectly as it is here.