We have reached the strangest time of year. Fall stuff, like leaves and pumpkins, is in the rearview mirror. Some people are indeed in full-on Christmas mode, but if you’re anything like me, festive feelings don’t really kick in until mid-December if at all. This leaves an odd time in late November/early December that’s just there, awkwardly sandwiched between Halloween and Christmas/New Year.
It’s a well-documented phenomenon that there aren’t many classic Thanksgiving movies. Much has been written about this strange reality with many long lists on the internet trying to help viewers uncover hidden movie gems. Greg Mottola’s 1996 film The Daytrippers often makes such lists.
But the great strength of this movie is less in how it embodies Thanksgiving and more in how it captures the holiday spirit.
No, not the spirit of Christmas but the spirit of this whole strange three-week gap that comes right after Thanksgiving.
Appropriately enough, The Daytrippers starts in the car as married couple Eliza (Hope Davis) and Louis (Stanley Tucci) drive home after the events of the family Thanksgiving holiday. Whatever that holiday entailed is left to the viewers’ imagination as the movie has no concern for matters of food preparation or family drama. This is a movie about the day after Thanksgiving when Eliza’s parents, Jim (Pat McNamara) and Rita Malone (Anne Meara) are going to join their daughter Jo (Parker Posey) and her boyfriend Carl (Liev Schreiber) on a day trip into the city (New York, I believe).
As one expects of a movie set around Thanksgiving time, it is a movie about family, but it’s less a movie about family drama or togetherness than it is a movie about family potential, possibility, and images of what their family might be in the future. At this point, Jim and Rita have grown-up children. Eliza has married Louis and Jo is away at college in Michigan. As such the parents are in a space of figuring out what their relationship with their adult children will look like in the future. This is a minor piece of the narrative, but the movie does present some humorous tension between Jo and her mother about squabbles befitting a teenager, such as what Jo wears or if she can have boys over.
The bigger threads of thematic tension concern Jo and Eliza and their respective relationships. Over the course of the day, Jo realizes that Carl is less impressive and interesting than she thought. This is perhaps best conveyed through the family car trips. Pragmatically, this helped Mottola conserve the film’s small budget, but thematically, it provides an eclectic range of medium close-ups that convey the relationship dynamics in the car. Throughout the day, Carl tells the plot of his certainly-never-going-to-actually-be-written novel, a typically 90s/postmodern work about a man with a dog’s head. He’s quick to wax poetic about themes of the novel and espouse his pro-aristocracy political opinions. Jo, in her typical teenager-like way, is all on board with this for a while, but she reaches her limit, a fact conveyed expertly by Parker Posey’s wonderful facial expressions.
Eliza is also at an unexpected crossroads. She wakes up the day after Thanksgiving to find a secret love poem among Louis’s things. She meets up with the rest of her family in the city and they bum around together while Eliza attempts to figure out what is going on with her husband. She figures it out at the day’s end, finding him at a party, and finding out that the mysterious Sandy was not a woman but another man. Part of what makes the film’s conclusion so unexpectedly powerful is how Eliza processes this information, ultimately charting a new path for herself. One might expect the dull Carl or unfaithful Louis to be villainous figures, but this is far from the case. They remain entirely human and fully sympathetic. Viewers are left, incredibly, rooting for everyone in the movie at the end, as they all seem to be better off even as some of the core relationships head in a different direction.
It’s this sense of realistic loss that I think makes the film perfect for capturing this time of year.
This is a family in flux and the rare movie that highlights family drama adjacent to the domestic space.
The focus is on Eliza and Louis and Jo and Carl, but the movie tells those stories centered on how the day unfolds, tied together with the parents, Jim and Rita. Jim’s silly questions to Carl, like what kind of dog’s head the man has, helps Jo start to see Carl as he really is. Rita’s work with Eliza helps them get the name Sandy, track Louis down and uncover the truth. Through these interactions, we see the layers of a remarkably healthy family even at a moment of upheaval.
The holidays are often thought of on film in terms of family, whether that family is absent (Home Alone), small (Elf), or massive (Fanny and Alexander). Family is central to The Daytrippers, too, but in a different way, not focused on dysfunction but on inevitable change and motion. This is a movie in motion, driving in the car, dashing around the streets. This reflects the sense of change dawning on Eliza and Jo. But there aren’t really that many holiday movies that accept that along with whatever Thanksgiving or Christmas celebrations you might have, the holidays are a chaotic time of motion when anything could change at a moment’s notice. There’s nothing domestic about the Malones. This is a day trip, after all. A day trip that captures something really unique about this odd time of year: a sense of loss, a bit of chaos, and some version of family along for a ride.
