National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985)

National Lampoon's European Vacation arrives in 1985 with a game show prize, a station wagon full of Americans, and Amy Heckerling in the director's chair. The Griswolds win an all-expenses trip to the continent and spend the rest of the running time confirming every suspicion Europe holds about their countrymen. Stonehenge topples. A roundabout defeats a grown man for the better part of an afternoon. The film has no thesis beyond the observation that foreigners are peculiar and that families are embarrassing. We have seen this before. The sequel knows we have seen this before.

The cast is uniformly white, and the jokes are uniformly national. The French are rude, the Germans are hearty, the Italians are criminals, and the English are Eric Idle. Nothing in the film engages with race, sexuality, gender politics, the climate, or the human body beyond the mechanics of slapstick. Ellen Griswold has her private video projected onto a Roman billboard, which the screenplay treats as a punchline about her husband's carelessness. That is the closest the film comes to a social argument. Wealth is celebrated without irony. A free trip is won and squandered. No character wrestles with their identity, no institution is indicted, and no lesson is delivered at the end.

The result is a travelogue with a body count of monuments. Heckerling keeps the pace brisk and the xenophobia light, which in 1985 passed for a pleasant evening. The film topped the box office and earned mixed notices, and it has aged into a curious artifact: a comedy that wants nothing from its audience except a laugh and a vague sense of national superiority. We score it accordingly, which is to say we score it at nothing. A clean sheet. In this line of work, that is a kind of rest.