National Lampoon's Vacation (1983)

Clark Griswold wants to take his family to a theme park in California, and the machinery of American comedy grinds him down for ninety-eight minutes. Harold Ramis directs John Hughes's screenplay with the tidy brutality of a man who knows exactly where the laughs live. The Wagon Queen Family Truckster, an automotive insult in metallic pea, is the film's finest invention. Everything else is a station wagon full of grievances.

The humor is humiliation, delivered without mercy. A dog dies because nobody untied the leash. Aunt Edna perishes in her sleep and spends a leg of the journey strapped to the roof under a tarpaulin. Clark swims naked with a blonde in a motel pool and is discovered by his family. Beverly D'Angelo's Ellen absorbs all of this with a patience the screenplay never examines, and the film has no interest in examining it. Women here are wives, irritants, or scenery in a red Ferrari. The nudity exists to embarrass a man, not to celebrate a body. Consumer satire flickers now and then, mostly at the expense of a theme park that closes for repairs, but the target is disappointment, not capital.

What remains is craft. The gags land, the pacing is brisk, and Chevy Chase plays baffled entitlement better than anyone of his generation. On the cultural ledger this picture is blank. It arrived in 1983 with no interest in the social questions that would later become compulsory, and it makes no attempt to anticipate them. A comedy can be honest about nothing and still be funny. This one is.

It is a road trip, and the road leads nowhere in particular. That is the joke, and the joke holds up better than most of the era's earnest gestures. There is no sermon waiting at Walley World, only a closed gate and a man with a BB gun. We can respect the honesty of that, even as we mark the empty columns and move on to the next title on the docket. Cinematic history is long, and the ledger does not flatter sentiment. It simply records what was there, and what was not. In this case, quite a lot was not, and the film is no worse for it, merely of its time, which is the only verdict available to us and the only one it ever asked for. The credits roll over snapshots, the family flies home, and nothing has been argued. Refreshing, in its way. Rare, too. The classification stands at zero across the board, and we file it accordingly, without complaint and without ceremony, as the work of men who wanted only to make people laugh and largely succeeded at it. Such pictures are increasingly hard to find, and we note their passing with something close to regret. The docket moves on regardless, indifferent to our preferences, which is exactly as it should be. We score what is present, never what we wish were present, and this film presents almost nothing beyond the pursuit of a good gag, executed with professional competence and a certain grim joy. There is no shame in that. There is, however, no column for it either. So the ledger stays empty, the review concludes, and the next title is called. Such is the work. Such is the ledger.