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Like cranberry sauce and tryptophan, sitting down to a movie on Thanksgiving is tradition. But unlike Christmas, the recipe for a “Thanksgiving movie” is loosely defined. Christmas movies, whether they’re made by Hallmark or Frank Capra or John McTiernan, tick certain boxes: gift giving, some flavor of Santa Claus, miracles. Thanksgiving movies are harder to pin down, by definition domestic in both their setting and the holiday’s origins. When was the last time Hollywood produced a classic Turkey Day movie? You’d think the holiday would inspire some memorable films beyond Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Pieces of April, and Hannah and Her Sisters. So we posed a question to several filmmakers and Hollywood friends this week: Why are Thanksgiving movies not a thing?
The answers provided some interesting insight. For one, it’s not actually a holiday in most of the world. “As a British person, I have no strong opinion or skin in the game,” said Edgar Wright. It’s a common sentiment. “As a Mexican kid growing up on the Mexican–U.S. border, it never made much sense to me,” said director Jorge Gutierrez (The Book of Life, Maya and the Three). “Thanksgiving is just not as universal, especially now in the streaming world,” he said. Patrick McHale, the animator behind fall-fueled cartoon Over the Garden Wall, also pointed out that turkey is usually associated with Christmas in England.
And if Thanksgiving movies were a tough sell before the era of globalized entertainment, it’s an even harder one when the imperative is to “create a megahit that would be entertaining for everyone,” said a manager at a major international streaming service. On top of all that, the holiday’s “invented narratives of the Wampanoag and Plymouth Colonists celebrating the harvest together,” McHale said, don’t exactly help either.
But for director David Lowery, how and when we watch certain films are part of the recipe. “The best Thanksgiving movies are just the movies you go see after dinner, which are forevermore tied to that holiday,” he said. Knives Out scratches the itch, he said, as do other wintry titles released on or ahead of the date, like Carol and The Holdovers. “Could both also qualify as Christmas movies? Absolutely,” Lowery said. “But Thanksgiving feels more appropriate, and I think the studios recognized this when choosing their theatrical release dates.”
Director Alex Ross Perry echoed the idea that our personal context is everything, and eloquently sent us another way of considering the Thanksgiving movie, accompanied by a watchlist of recommendations.
vulture asks
What Should One Watch on Thanksgiving?
By Alex Ross Perry
Not a year goes by that I don’t think about this. And, considering that a central part of my Thanksgiving traditions with friends is a nightly and rotating assortment of VHS tapes, we put more thought than most into what constitutes a “Thanksgiving movie.” That consideration can begin as early as September.
The simple answer to why Thanksgiving movies aren’t more prominent is also what makes Thanksgiving a superior holiday: It is based around “nothing” aside from the standard historical narrative. It’s for everybody, its five days revolve around a single meal, and the holiday is inclusive of Black Friday and the rest of the weekend. Unlike Christmas, whose movies don’t hit after the 25th, Thanksgiving is less a single dramatic day than the culmination of an entire season of autumnal vibes. Two days after Thanksgiving, you’re still eating leftovers, but you aren’t opening Christmas presents on December 27. And for most people — and all children — the entirety of the day itself is boring, unremarkable and undramatic. You just sit around waiting while your parents watch TV and cook.
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The examples you cite cover the two basic sides of the very thin and very small Thanksgiving coin: traveling somewhere and dealing with family. There’s no religious, narrative, or emotional investment the way Christmas conjures up infinite possibilities. Planes, Trains and Automobiles is thus to Thanksgiving what Jurassic Park is to dinosaurs: The filmmakers did it so perfectly that it’s better to rewatch it forever than try to make another film that attempts the same thing. (I’d also point at the John Hughes–written Dutch for a child-driven take on basically the exact same story. It’s not a classic for a reason. And people similarly cite Pieces of April or Home for the Holidays over The Myth of Fingerprints.)
Fundamentally, watching family dysfunction while dealing with or escaping your own sounds terrible; the fantasy of Christmas offered by everything from Home Alone to Arthur Christmas is not a part of the collective imagination surrounding Thanksgiving. Nobody wants to endure a Wednesday of flight delays and icy roads and finally come home to a stressed family, only to then watch characters suffer through the same.
The crucial expansion of the Thanksgiving movie is the (once proud, but still fairly strong) idea that movies could be released on or around Thanksgiving — that an action film could play alongside an animated title for the kids, or a gentle adult comedy, or a sophisticated thriller. You’d get a lot of Tony Scott and Denzel Washington movies by this logic, and if you look back, a surprising number of Denzel’s films were November releases. So it’s less “Is this movie about Thanksgiving?” and more “Could we have seen this at the multiplex on some random Thanksgiving weekend in the ’90s?”
Thus, my friends and I have isolated a very key sort of film that has become The Thanksgiving Film. Often snowy and cozy, entirely comedic or lightly dramatic, action-packed but in a practical way, featuring generations of women, ideally originally released between September and November … and always best enjoyed on videotape by the fire. I can’t explain the taxonomy of this list, but I hope it reads as logical with those criteria in mind:
➼ Grumpy Old Men
➼ Trapped in Paradise
➼ Nobody’s Fool
➼ Courage Under Fire
➼ The Siege
➼ The Pelican Brief
➼ Avalon
➼ The Devil’s Advocate
➼ One True Thing
➼ How to Make an American Quilt
➼ Quiz Show
➼ Analyze This
➼ Parenthood
➼ Snow Falling on Cedars
➼ A Civil Action
