All I Ever Wanted

IT'S BEEN a long wait for the people at National Lampoon since their first and only movie success Animal House. And it has been a while since Saturday Night Live alumnus Chevy Chase warmed America's cockles in "Foul Play." These probably explain why Chase and director Harold Ramis (of Stripes fame) have appeared on every talk show in the country at least twice in the last month, and why the Lampoon magazine wasted an entire issue to promote this comedy.

But, Vacation is not a rambunctious "laff riot" on the order of Animal House--not withstanding newspaper ads depicting Chase in a mock epic pose with Beverly D'Angelo and Christie Brinkley each gripping a leg. It is, rather, a fairly subtle and biting parody of upper-middle class middle America.

The film is based on the John Hughes Lampoon short story and the idea is quite funny (although the execution doesn't always work). The vacation of a typical American--if there is such a thing--to Disney World (called Wally World starring Marty Mouse in the movie) just cries out to be parodied.

The movie, which is about as simple as they come, chronicles the summer vacation of a quintessentially WASPish upper-crust suburban Chicago family which--as sure as there is an alligator on Chevy's pink Polo shirt--runs amok.

Chase plays the father, Clark W. Griswold, who is not content with merely flying to California. He plans the entire trip on his personal computer, and is determined to experience Americana by hopping into the old tank of a station wagon and riding down the highway with sentimental music on the radio.

As the trip progresses, things begin to go wrong. Chevy falls asleep at the wheel, the crew get lost in the middle on the desert, they lose all their money, and what was once a peaceful journey through the land of Mom, apple pie and Chevrolet degenerates into "a quest for fun."

In Arizona, a stuffy concierge insists that Chase's credit cards are lost and refuses to cash a check because he has no plastic to back it up. Our hero then cleans out the hotel cash register. Soon after, the family discovers that crotchety old Aunt (Imogene Coca) has passed away in the car. In a Pythonesque sick joke, the family straps the body to the roof and deposits it at the widower's doorstep in Phoenix in the midst of a rainstorm.

There are many gags in the movie which work, not because of skilled turns by pratfall-meister Chase, but because of well thought-out and well-timed routines which ring true in the context of the movie.

Even such tired schticks as the magic fingers bed gone haywire, the supermacho highway patrolman sniveling over a small animal, and the kids catching mom and dad making whoopie, bring a laugh because Chase and Beverly D'Angelo (Mrs. Cariswold) do not try to overplay the scenes.

Some of the humor is unnecessary and tasteless, such as when Blacks in a St. Louis ghetto steal the station wagon's hubcaps while Chase asks for directions, or when the teenage daughter of some ridiculously hick relative brags that daddy says she is the best french kisser. These stereotypical characterizations--while occasionally funny in the racist, sexist world of the National Lampoon magazine--are completely gratuitous in a movie of this type.

Another disappointment is the movie debut of model/goddess Christie Brinkley as the temptress in the red Ferrari who leads Chase into all kinds of trouble. The Brinkley character--if you could call it that--is an obvious rip-off of the Suzanne Sommers' blonde in American Grafitti and has about as much personality as--well--a Sports Illustrated bathing suit spread. Brinkley--who is so sexy on paper--is embarrassing on celluloid, because, as simple as her part is, she can't act.

Chase is another story altogether. Given a script for the first time that is not inane, he does not have to resort to his own antics to get the laugh. The performance is his best since he left Saturday Night because he plays a character--not himself. This is not a Chevy Chase movie, as were his past star vehicles with dwarves and dogs and the like. If Chase lacks a distinctive comic persona, his schlep routine served him well as the cause of his success. But it has also revealed his limitations as an actor. When Chase's characters conform well to his klutzy-but-optimistic comic routine--as with the memorable Gerald Ford satires in the first years of the Not For Prime Time Players--he is a very funny man. But when Chevy has to be himself, the result is merely tedium, as has been the case with most of his film career.

Luckily, Vacation gives him the chance to be the former.