Read: Where are all the Thanksgiving pop-culture classics?įittingly, Addams Family Values centers on a schism in its Gothic household of well-dressed, joyfully macabre aristocrats. Even the comedies tend toward the bittersweet. Movies like Planes, Trains and Automobiles Hannah and Her Sisters and The Ice Storm are about fractured families, reunions gone wrong, and the overwhelming stress of the holiday. The general history of Thanksgiving movies is pretty rocky: Compared to the venerable Christmas film, there are very few highlights, and the ones that do stand the test of time tend to be melancholy. But Addams Family Values uses its ensemble to playfully skewer the “us versus them” dichotomy underlying the very notion of the American Thanksgiving. Addams’s characters had always been a funhouse-mirror version of the traditional nuclear family. Together, Sonnenfeld and Rudnick created an unpredictable and brilliant satire (which is currently streaming on STARZ).
For the sequel, Sonnenfeld brought in the playwright and humorist Paul Rudnick, who later became a regular in the pages of The New Yorker that Addams had once haunted. The film was a surprise hit, although it got mixed reviews, suffered from a convoluted plot of mistaken identity, and had a tortured production. In 1991, Barry Sonnenfeld directed the original movie The Addams Family, about the cartoonist Charles Addams’s famously morbid clan.
The film is a perfect cup of dry cider with just the barest undertone of sweetness. That’s why Addams Family Values, a sequel that turns 25 years old this week, remains the pinnacle of the subgenre-even if none of the characters ever sits down for a turkey dinner. The Thanksgiving story is, after all, quite a bit more complicated than its surface message of harmony between Pilgrims and Native Americans might suggest. The second component is a firm refutation of the holiday’s core mythos. The first is a celebration of family, whether actual kin or a makeshift community. The ideal Thanksgiving movie has at least two ingredients.
0 kommentar(er)
