FILM In Which We Take A Little Time Off
Monday, May 18, 2009 at 9:39AM 
His To Play Around In
by CHAD PERMAN
To understand my love of National Lampoon’s Vacation you first have to understand that my dad is Clark W. Griswald. Tone down the more extreme pratfalls and absurdly outlandish behaviors (especially in the film’s final act), strip away just a bit – and only the tiniest bit – of his enthusiasm for family adventures and traditions, and you have my father; he of the big plans and grand ideas; he of the boundless energy and optimism; he of the lists and schedules that hung like hornet’s nests over my childhood;he of the family outings, the family rituals, the family above all else; he of the big heart, and misguided grand gestures.
And, though he’s changed a good deal since my sister and I grew up and left the house nearly ten years ago – has relaxed a bit more and learned to let life happen at its own pace now and then - he is still that same man at times and, forever, in our family’s collective remembrance.
To understand my love of National Lampoon’s Vacation you also have to understand that, as a child, I would have laid down my life for Mr. Chevy Chase. Outside of my father, he was the funniest man I knew, a bumbling and hilarious presence no matter where he managed to show up.
To understand my love of Vacation you finally have to understand what it represented, what it was to a boy being raised in a sheltered, religious family and community (thank you, Seventh Day Adventism!), a world where a Rated R movie was a movie that would never be seen. Of course, we had our ways around this – we couldn’t be monitored 24/7 after all, so we managed 5-10 minute peaks at Beverly Hills Cop, Tin Men, or Flashdance, films my parents had recorded during those occasional random childhood Godsends known as “free previews” of pay cable stations.
Netflix it wasn’t, but it still allowed us to hear bad words, see some sex and violence, and feel like we’d gotten away with something. Into this mix, then, comes National Lampoon’s Vacation, a film I was sure I’d love before I’d even seen a single frame, but a film I’m ultimately kept from seeing, even on video, due to its rating.
My parents see how much this kills me, and make vague promises that we can rent it and all watch it together (a well-intentioned decision no doubt, but still an oddly premised one: that they can pause the video and put whatever possible sex and/or violence we view into some kind of context so that it doesn’t scar us as much, a pattern of logic that one day led to the enormously uncomfortable experience of my entire family trying to watch My Own Private Idaho together because it had the guy from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure in it.). So, I decided at age 10 that the very day I turned 18, I would go to a video store and rent Vacation. By the time I turned 18, of course, I had much different things on my mind.
But still - the promise and allure of Vacation! The dream of a life where I was finally grown up enough to watch a movie like Vacation whenever I damn well wanted, where I could view Christie Brinkley’s breasts simply because I felt like it (my friend and I were convinced they must have been on display at some point to garner the film it’s R rating; sadly, this turned out to be untrue), where I could spend my days doing nothing but watching forbidden movies and shoving gallons of ice cream into my face (which I also wasn’t allowed to have, due to a childhood allergy to dairy).
This vision of the future appealed to me on such a deep and basic level as a sheltered kid, played over and over in my mind so many times, that the association between Vacation and a yearned for adulthood will likely never leave me.
And then there’s Vacation itself, stripped of all the subjective meanings I bring to it, still more than standing up as a fine comedy 25 years after its release: one man’s grand quest to drive the family he loves across the country to visit a Wally World, and all the misunderstandings, crazy characters, and hilarity that they encounter along the way.
It’s hardly groundbreaking — as either a comedy or a road movie –but it works like gangbusters, largely due to the chemistry between Chase and Beverly D’Angelo (his wife in all four Vacation films, despite the rotating cast of children), as well as the strong writing and Chase’s (at the time) impeccable comedic timing. Despite memorable performances from Eugene Levy, Christie Brinkley, Randy Quaid, and John Candy, this is still every bit Chase’s show, and though he’d manage to run the character into the ground by the time he all but phoned in 1999’s Vegas Vacation, here the role was still shiny and new, his to play around in, and he dove in head first.
Griswald continually subjects himself to such hardship and humiliation for no other reason than that he loves his family and wants them to have a fun vacation, dammit. And in that sense I could relate to it endlessly, could project my own father’s noisome imperfections onto the screen and laugh as they were transformed into Chevy Chase’s exaggerated cluelessness and well-meaning mistakes. Chase’s performance became funnier because I knew my Dad, and my Dad, in turn, became a less frustrating, better-intentioned person seen through the prism of one Clark W. Griswald.
Chad Perman is the senior contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Brewster McCloud.
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