National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989)

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation arrives from 1989, a year in which a studio comedy could assemble an extended family, two yuppie neighbors, a SWAT team, and a Rottweiler, and still produce a cast that is uniformly white without anyone in the room feeling moved to comment. The film's world is a sealed Chicago suburb, a closed system of bickering in-laws and electrocuted cats. No gay characters appear. No feminist argument is made. The women are wives, mothers, and a neighbor in a fur coat, and the screenplay asks nothing else of them. The eccentric relatives are broad comic types, and the movie has no vocabulary for diagnosing them.

The only flicker of social grievance comes from Clark's Christmas bonus, or its absence. He has counted on the check, put money down on a pool he cannot afford, and the envelope contains a Jelly of the Month Club membership. He curses his employer with real heat, and the film grants him ninety seconds of class anger before Frank Shirley is kidnapped, deposited in the living room, and persuaded to reverse himself. The bonuses return. The pool survives. Corporate generosity solves what corporate stinginess caused, a tidy arrangement and a suspicious one, though the movie has no interest in noticing.

Later, Clark's father takes him aside in the driveway to explain that a man should not ruin his family over a perfect Christmas. That is the film's entire moral instruction, one scene of gentle sermonizing, delivered by an old man in a cardigan. Everything else is escalation: a squirrel, a burned tree, a sewage line ignited by a cigar. The picture holds its place as a Christmas classic on the strength of its slapstick and its refusal to mean anything. We have classified it accordingly. It means nothing, and it means it well.