Fridae

The passing of 80s cinematic humorist John Hughes in 2009 has created a nostalgic void for the mix of cleverness, crudeness and heart that characterized Hughes’ best work, Planes, Trains and Automobiles. The 1987 comedy with Steve Martin and John Candy was even labelled one of the “Great Movies” by Roger Ebert. Todd Phillips, whose The Hangover was one of the year’s surprise hits, is here in the oughts with Due Date, a 21st century update of Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

Like Planes, Due Date tackles that most American of subjects, the Great Cross-Country Road Trip, with an odd couple comprising a straight man and his fool. The straight man here is Peter Highman (Robert Downey Jr.), a tightly wound Atlanta architect hoping to receive his child in Los Angeles when his wife gives birth. The fool here is Ethan Tremblay (Zach Galifianakis), a wannabe actor whose ineptitude and cluelessness make him a walking disaster area. In a setup fitting for the anxiety-ridden days of 21st century air travel Highman’s tightly-organized and wound world falls apart when a series of accidents puts him on the no-fly list, along with Tremblay. On their road trip, the unlikely pair will run into hostile locals, chirpily malicious Mexican cops, and the unwanted company of each other. In an original twist, Highman and Tremblay never actually become total friends, but Highman more or less learns about accepting chaos in his tightly ordered life. He may not have to like it, but he can allow it and accept it even when it turns his life upside down.

Due Date is competently shot but while it is amusing enough to invite a few chuckles and smiles, its laughs are rarely big. Comedy’s one of the toughest of genres to make work, being where no one knows all the rules and even the best of directors can perhaps only grasp a few, and for a comedy to work it does often need more than a few of those rules acting in concert. One wrong move, one inconsistency, and comedy easily turns into farce or even tragedy. It is not helped by the general trend in American comedy to slide into the need for conservativism, moralising and uplifting endings. Though to its credit, even here the film subverts it a little in the ending.

And it says something that Due Date’s best moments are not when it’s doing comedy, but tragedy, and good tragedy at that. Arguably the film’s best scene takes place in a bathroom where Tremblay is pretending that his wife just dumped him and he’s talking to her on the phone, and it segues seamlessly into him relating the loss of his father that he loved dearly. It later goes into a private moment where Tremblay and Highman relate to each other over their own fathers, for Highman, his being absent since young. Downey and Galifianakis are intelligent actors and deliver the needed emotional impact with aplomb, but here’s the second major problem for this reviewer: unlike Steve Martin and John Candy in the original Planes, they both seem a little miscast in this. Martin and Candy were able to give great performances because their characters were written as basic extensions of personae they had previously perfected in sketch comedy: Martin’s uptight, deadpan mannerisms and Candy’s well-meaning but oblivious bumblingness were perfected over their years in sketch comedy, so doing those personae was almost second nature to them in Planes, akin to donning a pair of old boots. Here Downey and Galifianakis, try as they might, may be trying too hard to reach the requisite level of “naturalness” required of their roles.

The film is an example of good actors in an okay script, but where the timing is not always there in order for the comedy to be funny and the actors come off miscast through no fault of their own. For those longing for their dose of possible successors to John Hughes, this might be a good temporary placebo.