Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version
***/**** Image A Sound A- Commentary B
starring Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo, Randy Quaid, Miriam Flynn
written by John Hughes
directed by Jeremiah Chechik
Updated to correct an embarrassing blunder on 12/28/2022.-Ed.
by Bill Chambers After turning in a subpar first draft of National Lampoon’s European Vacation and ghosting the production thereafter, John Hughes made an unexpected return to the franchise by writing and producing National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, loosely basing his screenplay, like that of the first …Vacation, on one of his short stories for NATIONAL LAMPOON magazine. Both “Vacation ’58” and “Christmas ’59” are written as a childhood reminiscence and get their humour from the discordant pairing of morbid memories and misty-eyed prose. (Think Jean Shepherd in charge of the police blotter.) There is no Clark Griswold per se in these stories, only a hazy father figure coming unglued. As a result, Hughes butted heads with director Harold Ramis on the original, since Ramis was making a Chevy Chase vehicle, not a coming-of-age flick. By Christmas Vacation, Hughes was at a different place in his personal and professional lives, raising children and turning mogul, and the film finds him identifying with the patriarch almost to the exclusion of the kid characters. His screenplay, in fact, reclaims Clark from Amy Heckerling’s aimless and conceptually fuzzy European Vacation, seizing on the pressure cooker of the holiday season as a poignant trigger for Clark’s compulsive need to contrive Kodak, nay, Hallmark moments.
Cramming a series convention into this relatively interior entry, the picture opens with a near-death driving experience as the Griswolds go on a treacherous quest for the perfect Christmas tree. Some of the stuntwork in this prologue is impressively lunatic (the family’s station wagon drifts beneath an eighteen-wheeler), and the entire sequence, from Clark (Chase) playing chicken with a pick-up truck to the Griswolds’ poaching of a 25ft. fir from the middle of the forest, speaks to these films’ sneaky commentary on suburbanites as low-key colonizers with a wicked sense of entitlement. But the best part comes later, when Clark is in bed trying to read a magazine and can’t turn the pages without them sticking to his fingers because of tree sap. Hughes and Chase each kept going bigger and broader as they got older but thrived in these small spaces where the jokes are almost between the lines. That sap is also a loaded symbol in Christmas Vacation, not just for the treacly nostalgia that occasionally rears its head but also for the unpleasant reality behind any yuletide façade–a sentiment no less relatable, perhaps even more relatable, for being expressed scatologically, with a side of dead animals, as per National Lampoon tradition.
The Griswolds are hosting Christmas for their in-laws from all over the country, including, eventually, fan-favourite Cousin Eddie (Randy Quaid). If Christmas Vacation has a fundamental flaw, it’s the unwieldiness of its supporting cast, which defeats Hughes’s ability to breathe life into the most minor characters. What paints an evocative mental picture on the page–an endless parade of aunts and uncles that brings to mind one of those infinite handkerchiefs magicians and clowns yank from their sleeves–somehow doesn’t translate to the screen, becoming an exercise in traffic control. The movie stacks the deck with veteran character actors but herds them from one scene to the next with an irreverent bordering on insulting disregard for their screen legacies. (You’d never guess that Diane Ladd had Oscar nominations in her past and future.) The exception, other than Quaid, is the late-arriving William Hickey, the Ghost of Abel Ferrara’s Future, a brand if not household name hired to William Hickey it up all over the final third of the film. (Mae Questel, the voice of Olive Oyl and Betty Boop, is encouraged to keep up with him as his cat- and Jell-O mould-wrapping wife.) Even he belongs to this pack of houseguests who all hum at the same curmudgeonly frequency, though, and lack any traits that might meaningfully differentiate Clark’s side of the family from that of wife Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo, the only cast member besides Chase to appear in every big-screen Vacation). Christmas Vacation is the reason the short version of Fanny and Alexander is still over three hours long.
Still, the film kind of works despite itself as a proto-mother! in which these interlopers are the physical manifestation of Clark’s mounting anxiety. Christmas Vacation doesn’t have much of a plot, per se, but pulling the sleigh forward is the mystery of whether Clark will receive the Christmas bonus he’s counting on to afford the swimming pool he wants to surprise the family with. The picture reveals that Clark is a “food additive designer” for a Dupont-esque chemical company–mostly, one suspects, so that Clark can coat a saucer sled in an industrial lubricant and go bumpety-bump-bump over hills of snow at Mach 10. (Chase is unusually good at portraying the comic terror of high-speed travel.) Nevertheless, his financial worries seem improbable, unless the Griswolds are always bleeding money on house repairs and hospital bills off-camera. They live in a colossal home Hughes describes in his screenplay as “a fine upper middle class dwelling,” but he kind of wants to have his cake and eat it, too, here, framing Clark’s contempt for the yuppie couple next door as a form of class resentment–or is it that their sleek modernity is in vulgar contrast to the Griswolds’ inherited customs? I think it’s a joke in itself that the yuppies have a CD player–they’re digital, the Griswolds are analogue–but 33 years has turned everyone here into dinosaurs. Alas, 33 years have also made it harder to sympathize with a guy who’s used to Christmas bonuses big enough to subsidize a swimming pool for not already having swimming-pool money at his disposal. Nor was it easy at the time, hence Hughes’s big cheat of writing Clark’s work dynamics like “The Jetsons”, with Clark’s boss (Brian Doyle-Murray) a Mr. Spacely-esque tyrant who never gets the name “Griswold” right. One white, middle-aged, white-collar male employee speaking to another this way doesn’t ring true of corporate culture, no matter how far back we turn the clock. What we’re witnessing in Christmas Vacation is the beginning of Hughes losing touch with matters of money and other trivial human concerns, à la Doctor Manhattan.
Yet Christmas Vacation is undeniably a highlight of the series, Hughes’s producorial output, and Chase’s checkered career. (They’re all pretty checkered.) Replacing Chris Columbus, who moved on to Home Alone for Hughes after the mercurial Chase refused to work with him, first-time director Jeremiah Chechik brings a quintessentially French-Canadian sensibility to the film, shooting winter with what can only be described as a miserabilist fondness that accommodates Hughes’s wild swings between comedy and pathos–neutralizing Chase’s resting sarcasm to sell us on the authenticity of Clark’s emotional pivots into wistfulness and melancholy–and between different types of comedy as well. The Griswold kids, Rusty (Johnny Galecki) and Audrey (Juliette Lewis), were always destined to be recast as the original actors aged out of their roles, but one of Christmas Vacation‘s first and most successful gags finds Rusty having grown considerably younger between movies–a rare foray into self-reflexive humour for Hughes that remains enticingly cryptic. Galecki’s deadpan affect pays dividends when the relatives first arrive and Chechik goes handheld to capture the chaos of the conversational square dance that suddenly erupts–a scene that’s just one of the reasons the picture has a reach beyond its franchise origins. The exploding cat is another. (Sickos!) And still another is Clark’s utterly sympathetic desire to kindle in others the festive feeling he gets watching home movies of his childhood self carting around a toboggan, opening presents, and being entertained by adults drunk on eggnog, which only suggest there’s no such thing as the perfect Christmas until it becomes a memory.
Warner brings National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation to 4K UHD disc in conjunction with three other staples of modern holiday programming: A Christmas Story, The Polar Express, and Elf. The 1.85:1, 2160p transfer, enhanced with HDR10, steeply upgrades the 2006 Blu-ray while offering more minor improvements on the included 25th-anniversary reissue (which, it should be noted, presents the film at HD-native 1.78:1). The 4K version tightens up the messy grain structure of the latter and takes fine detail to new heights without sacrificing the inherent diffusions of Thomas Ackerman’s cinematography. HDR enriches the blacks and allows light sources to glow with uncanny realism, while a montage of Christmas shopping early on really shows off the specular highlights in a glittery ode to commerce. The wider colour gamut is a profound gift to the movie’s reds and greens, and although the palette now leans in a controversially warm direction, at the risk of championing revisionism I will say that the SDR Blu-ray, with its comparatively naturalistic skin tones, looks lifeless next to the new colour grade, as if everybody needs a blood transfusion. Audio comes in “English (remastered),” i.e., 5.1 DTS-HD MA, and “original theatrical English,” i.e., 2.0 DTS-HD MA; to my ears, the former has superior dialogue reproduction, even though the remix, exclusive to the 4K platter, was mastered at a higher volume. The benefit of the 5.1 track is that it better exploits the rear channels during the action scenes, such as they are. Take your pick, ultimately.
Appearing on both discs is a feature-length commentary from 2006 that reunited director Jeremiah Chechik and producer Matty Simmons with stars Beverly D’Angelo, Johnny Galecki, Miriam Flynn, and a pre-tinfoil hat-dom Randy Quaid. It’s a somewhat listless yakker light on controversy, though D’Angelo admits she’s always happy to be reunited with the deafeningly absent Chase and glad to be rid of him by the end of production. Quite a few deleted scenes are referred to but remain nowhere to be found on this third reissue (Hughes’s script, for what it’s worth, has a bit more of that risqué National Lampoon humour than made it into the PG-13 film), but the participants mostly get caught up in dogpiling on D’Angelo’s hair. Simmons’s recollections of the nascent Lampoon’s stage show are a highlight (I wonder if it’s a passive-aggressive dig at Chase that he brings up Bill Murray), and I loved Chechik’s confession that he hired the late, great Angelo Badalamenti to do the score because he was “the darkest composer that I could think of at the time” and “thought it would be a welcome change”–but I did find myself wishing that Quaid would launch into one of his patented Hollywood Star Whacker rants just to spice things up a little. The only other extra is the theatrical trailer, relegated to the Blu-ray in 480p. A download code for a digital copy of Christmas Vacation is tucked inside the keepcase, natch.
97 minutes; PG-13; UHD: 1.85:1 (2160p/MPEG-H, HDR10), BD: 1.78:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); UHD: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, English 2.0 DTS-HD MA, French DD 1.0, Spanish DD 1.0, BD: English 2.0 DTS-HD MA, Castilian Spanish DD 2.0 (Stereo), Latin Spanish DD 1.0; UHD: English SDH, French, Spanish, Dutch subtitles, BD: English SDH, French, Castilian Spanish, Latin Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish subtitles; BD-66 + BD-50; Region-free; Warner
