The Roast Turkey Of Sadness

One of the movies I recently received from my ever-shrinking Netflix queue was Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. It’s a classic 80’s movie starring Steve Martin and John Candy, and somehow I didn’t hear about until recently. The story follows the two men—one brash and jovial, the other dour and temperamental—as they try to make it from New York to Chicago for Thanksgiving amid a host of obstacles.

It’s a hilarious film and, per the standards of holiday movies, has a touching and heartwarming ending. I didn’t really know it was a Thanksgiving movie when I ordered it, and when it came in just a week before the holiday I was pleasantly surprised to see that it’s a genuine comedy. Over the years, I’d come to the conclusion that Thanksgiving films, by some unwritten Hollywood rule, apparently all have to be depressing tales about dysfunctional families.

One such movie I remembered seeing was The Myth of Fingerprints, a 1997 film starring Noah Wyle and Julianne Moore. It was shot not far from my old workplace in the woods of western Maine, and the plot basically takes the “dysfunctional family gets together” route. Among the salient points is the fact that Wyle’s father made a drunken pass at his girlfriend back in the day, and that Moore is just an intolerable person completely uncaring about the fact that her bubbly sister is openly hitting on her husband. Entertainment Weekly’s take: “For all this film's finely wrought characterizations, it's a relief not to be related to any of these sourpusses.”

Perhaps this explains why, when reviewing lists of Thanksgiving movies, I initially thought this movie was The Ice Storm, another 1997 movie and one I haven’t actually seen. The Huffington Post had an almost identical reaction to Entertainment Weekly’s take on The Myth of Fingerprints, declaring, “This isn't a warm and fuzzy family film, but it might very well make you thankful these folks aren't members of your family.” With a cast of stars ranging from Sigourney Weaver to Tobey Maguire, it looks at another dysfunctional family (in Connecticut, no less) and its run-ins with sex and drugs and death around the Thanksgiving season.

Roger Ebert declared this the most depressing Thanksgiving movie ever made during his review of Pieces of April, a Turkey Day movie from 2003 that itself isn’t the happiest thing to hit the screen. Pieces of April follows the struggles of the protagonist, played by Katie Holmes, as she tries to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner for her visiting family. It flirts with being a comedy, but there’s also the fact that Holmes is hoping to show her worthiness to her mother, an overbearing and bitter woman dying of breast cancer.

Great stuff to sit down to after that second helping of stuffing, right? No wonder the typical TV offerings tend to be football or the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special.

It’s not to say that I think every movie related to Thanksgiving should be exclusively about functional families and love and happiness, and the two movies from above that I did see are indeed pretty good despite their melancholy. It just always seemed like the tales from the Hollywood universe went from deep-seated family quarrels in late November to festive happiness only a month later for the Christmas movies. Who knows, maybe it has something to do with temperatures getting colder and families needing to huddle together a bit more.

For my own part, my sister has joked about the “dysfunctional” family that gets together for most of our Thanksgivings—the nuclear group plus several people who are related tangentially if at all—but so far none of us has hurled the turkey carcass at anyone. Here’s hoping everyone got a few good leftover sandwiches out of Thursday, and that your holiday wasn’t sad enough to constitute a movie plot.