National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)

Review Essay

Ugh, this one’s going to get me in trouble.  Okay, fair warning’s warranted here, since there are a few Christmas movies that a ton of other people think of as “classic” or “traditional” that I think are….well, I think are mediocre, if not flat-out bad.  And wow, is National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation one of them: I had never seen it before watching it for this blog, and so alas I had to make this discovery as an adult and in real time while I scribbled down notes.  So, if hearing about this film from the perspective of somebody who was dismayed and surprised by how much it did NOT work for him is going to bother you, this is probably a post to skip, since I’ll be honest about how this one struck me as an audience member.  Obviously, this is no judgment on anybody’s holiday spirit (or taste in film) if you disagree with me!

There’s a ton of humor coming at you in NLCV — broad physical performances and also a ton of scripted jokes from John Hughes, a man who wrote plenty of movies I liked a lot better (including a couple of pretty iconic holiday films).  I think part of the struggle for me was that it was really hard for me to locate the movie’s tone: is this a silly, Three Stooges-esque film to watch with a bunch of kids laughing at cartoonish sight gags?  Or is it a much more adult movie that’s best watched without anybody under the age of 13 in the room?  Is Clark Griswold a kind of indestructible Wile E. Coyote, or a naive Christmas-loving simpleton, or a sleazy yet clumsy asshole, or a sympathetic and downtrodden protagonist?  The answer is….kind of all of them?  Whichever one of them allows for a quick gag or an attempt at humor in the moment is who he is for the 30 seconds surrounding the gag.  Because my sense of this Hughes script is that it’s not written out of much real interest in the characters or the setting: instead, it strings together a series of sketches in which a loosely consistent cast of characters sets up joke after joke (no matter how painfully unfunny….or painful and unfunny….they often are) and then moves on to the next scene.  Is this a Christmas Monty Python and the Holy Grail?  If so, I can only wish that the members of Python had given this script a quick once-over, since the wit and intelligence of Grail’s writing are how it gets away with an otherwise probably unworkable structure.

Casting Chase as the center of the film is truly puzzling, to me — Chevy’s a guy who made a career out of portraying a condescending, snide prick who, at best, you can’t help but admire for his slick skill.  And this makes him a really weird choice for someone you’re asking to land the plane as a world-weary everyman who just wants to recreate the feeling of one classic childhood Christmas morning.  There’s a truly uncanny element to his performance sometimes, too, that weirdly resembles Johnny Depp’s performance as Willy Wonka twenty years later — that manic open-mouthed grin, the detached fifty-yard stare, the sense of utter dissociation from at least half of what’s going on around him most of the time.  Wonka, though, is written in that film as a troubled freak, a character in need of growth and self-awareness who only achieves it after first confronting his own demons on some level: love it or hate it, it was a choice, and it imbued that character with some kind of dramatic or emotional weight.  I don’t know what Clark Griswold’s deal is, and I’m not sure the script does either.  He sure doesn’t confront anything about himself, or grow even a little, and if he was meant to be nothing but a punchline that would be fine, but I felt like the movie kept trying to make me empathize with him.  Maybe Chase was once a little more personally appealing than I find him now, but to me, a Christmas movie with Chevy as its star has to be one in which I’m rooting AGAINST him, not for him.

I’m not going to say that nothing in the movie worked for me — there were some moments of mayhem that did feel real (as opposed to either tired or else feverish), and as a guy who spent some happy Christmases in Chicago, I did love the glimpses of the city dressed up for the holiday.  I could have used a lot more of that.

Otherwise, watching this movie genuinely felt like a chore to me from about the 45 minute point onward: almost every joke in this film is either announced with a fanfare and an elaborate overture, or else it’s beaten to death with ruthless excess, and in either case, it just wrings what little fun I was going to have out of the moment.  And to be clear, part of what makes this dreary is just the waste of talent — it’s an impressive cast and a famously gifted screenwriter, and somehow I just feel like nobody’s being asked to do anything near their level of talent.  Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s skill as a comedienne is wasted on a minor and unhinged role as an operatically mean-spirited neighbor, E.G. Marshall’s knack for playing a cantankerous old man is here reduced to such a one-note performance that he might as well be a cardboard cutout in the scenes he appears in, etc.

I think part of what makes it hard to use the cast well is that, as designed, it’s difficult for me to make any sense of what this film is supposed to be.  Satire of the Christmas movie genre?  Broad slapstick comedy, but with enough profanity and sex jokes that it’s for adults and not kids?  Black comedy about the horrors of suburbia?  It could have been any of those things and I’m still not sure it wasn’t trying to be.  My guess is, if it works for you, it’s one of those things, but I’ll be darned if I can figure out which of them it would be.  The one thing the movie fully commits to communicating is how painfully awful it is to share Christmas with literally any member of your spouse’s immediate family….it’s a slightly atonal message to make central to your holiday movie, but it’s a message of some kind to start with.  But I can’t say it felt either keenly insightful or bleakly hilarious about this particular kind of social agony, and without achieving either of those, I’m left puzzled about how this could be a classic in annual rotation on cable channels.  I’m sure some of you will tell me (I hope politely, but I guess I did just say a lot of rude things about this movie) in the comments.

I Know That Face: The cast, as aforementioned, is stacked, but I’ll choose a few Yuletide crossovers from some of the lesser-known names.  Diane Ladd, perhaps best known for parts in 1970s classics like Chinatown and here playing one of many thankless roles as Clark’s mother, appeared in Christmas TV movies in 2018 and 2020: she’s Grandma Frances, whose heirloom ornaments are the missing McGuffin in Christmas Lost and Found, and she’s Nana in Charlie’s Christmas Wish, a Christmas movie about a veteran and a dog, so I’d rate that as having about 100% likelihood of getting a “Yes” for Plucked Heart Strings in a FFTH review, if it ever got one.  Brian Doyle-Murray, who you’ve seen in a lot of things (I think of Groundhog Day first, but you might easily be thinking of anything from Caddyshack to JFK to Wayne’s World) and who in this took on the thankless role of Clark’s horrible employer, has of course picked up spots in a couple of recent TV movies of his own: he plays a fellow surnamed Holliday in 2014’s Christmas Under Wraps and 2022’s A Cozy Christmas Inn, as well as appearing as Noel Nichols in 2015’s The Flight Before Christmas, a Christmas romantic flick that looks like a classic example of the Only One Bed trope, if that’s your thing.  Lastly, Sam McMurray plays Bill, Clark Griswold’s office pal — he might be a bit less recognizable to you (though to me he was instantly familiar from his role as the slimeball mattress king, Lester Leeman, in the aggressive beauty pageant satire, Drop Dead Gorgeous) but he’s still an actor with a ton of supporting credits over the years.  Sam McMurray offers at least a little variation on this category’s frequent theme of recent Netflix/Hallmark fare: he played Herman Munster, of all people, in the 1996 television movie, The Munsters’ Scary Little Christmas, and IMDB says he voices an unnamed character in Recess Christmas: Miracle on Third Street, a direct to video Christmas anthology movie from 2001 based on the Saturday morning cartoon series, Disney’s Recess.  What a rich tapestry the holiday movie “genre” is, eh?

That Takes Me Back: I have to be honest — I found the movie so alternately distasteful and boring that it was hard to fixate on the nostalgia material on offer, of which there was surely a fair amount.  Probably the most nostalgia-inducing slices here had to do with the light display — whether we’re talking the cumbersome string of lights (a modern Clark would have gone with one of those laser projection doohickeys and saved a ton of fuss) or the fact that serial wiring meant that in the old days one bulb being unscrewed could prevent the whole string from lighting up, or just the chaos of nine hundred plugs plugged into other plugs (which I feel power strip / surge protectors have now functionally put an end to).  I wonder if the tension of getting the perfect light display will rapidly fade from Christmas movie trope expectations now that there are so many simple ways to coordinate really dazzling light displays?

I Understood That Reference: There were a couple of nods to more iconic (and artistically successful) media products in NLCV: early in the film, Rusty’s watching the end of It’s a Wonderful Life (“teacher says, every time a bell rings”) right as the doorbell starts ringing, which to me implied that a bunch of angels were being made, or else It’s a Wonderful Life was being mocked….as always with this film, it’s slightly hard to tell.  And very late in the movie, Clark recites The Night Before Christmas for the family on Christmas Eve, right before a character arrives with his kidnapping victim and the movie changes tone another three times in three minutes.

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Holiday Vibes (8.5/10):  Look, there’s no question that basically the entire film is about things that are closely tied to holiday experiences, from painful family gatherings (hopefully rarer and less painful for most of us than what the Griswolds endure) to light displays to figuring out how to keep the magic of Santa alive for children.  Whatever else the film is, in my opinion, not doing right in its attempt to be a Christmas classic, it’s making serious efforts here on the vibes front.  Why only 8.5 out of 10, then, you might ask?  To me the film is a letdown by being unrealistic in a bad way — I don’t mind an unrealistic happy Christmas, since half of what we’re chasing every year is a mirage of the perfect holiday we’ll never achieve.  But this isn’t a holiday experience that makes me want to immerse myself in it — to the contrary, I found the viewing experience so off-putting that it dimmed my Christmas enthusiasm by more than a little.  I didn’t identify with the bad feelings; I just wanted to escape them.  Any movie that’s doing that can’t really reach the heights of a 10/10.  I mean, I think an artfully constructed bad Christmas that’s reminiscent of painfully real holiday memories could win me over (in the right mood), but whatever else this movie is, it’s not that.

Actual Quality (3/10):  I know, folks, I know, it’s a John Hughes movie and it’s full of great comedy stars and some of you grew up on this movie, and honestly, you can have it.  It’s competently made in terms of editing/set direction, and there are elements of good performances in spite of the script, but there’s just too many other complaints to offer, all of which I have already offered above.  This is, as always, not meant as an “objective” measure of the movie’s effectiveness for all viewers — just a loud wail of honest regret from yours truly, a deeply disappointed audience member.

Party Mood-Setter? Probably not.  I mean, this really isn’t for little kids, and it’s not for most grandparents either (the grandparents I had, anyway!).  The one thing I would say in its favor on this front is that I think a lot of the sight gags and slapstick would play better if it was something I was just catching a glimpse of as I moved around hanging ornaments, etc.  If you’re with a crowd that likes this movie already or if they don’t mind the edgier elements in the story, I can see it working as a background piece, especially on low volume.

Plucked Heart Strings? Haha, not even a little bit.  The film goes for sincerity about once every half hour as part of its cavalcade of tones, etc., but none of those moments came close to landing actual emotional connection, let alone tears, for me.

Recommended Frequency:  I’m never watching it again.  You’re welcome to, if somehow this sounds appealing (or if it’s an old favorite of yours).  If it’s your first time, my guess is you’ll either be more or less instantly aware of whether it’s your kind of movie or not.  If it’s a perennial classic for you, more power to you: I’ll just leave the room if you put it on, but that’s why most houses have more than one room.  If you haven’t seen it and you do want my advice, there are SO many other films to enjoy this holiday season — find another one, on this blog or elsewhere, and give it a whirl instead.

To stream this movie, as of right now, it looks like your easiest options are either Hulu or Max, if you subscribe to either one.  If you’re a cable subscriber, it looks to me like TBS will stream it for you, also.  You can pay to rent it at all the usual places (Amazon Prime, Google Play, Apple TV, Fandango, etc.), and if you like this movie a lot more than I do, it’s pretty cheaply available on Blu-ray or DVD at Amazon.  And as always, don’t forget about your local libraries!  Worldcat tells me there are copies of NLCV on DVD, available for checkout from 750 libraries — cheers to them all, and best of luck to you if you give this one a spin!