Vacation written and directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein, with Ed Helms, Christina Applegate, Skyler Gisondo and Chevy Chase. A Warner Bros. release. 99 minutes. Now playing. See listings.
Casting Ed Helms as the lead in a Vacation remake makes perfect sense.
After leaving his fake-correspondent duties on The Daily Show and making the jump to sitcom and movie acting, Helms has been building a gallery of character performances defined by compulsive decency, earnestness and profound sexual repression.
These qualities are ideally suited to the grown-up Rusty Griswold, whose attempt to recreate a childhood cross-country trip with his own family leads to a series of disasters. The best running gag in the new movie – written and directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein – is that Rusty should be the first person to run screaming from the idea, given his experiences in the original Vacation and its sequels.
“Not only is he not traumatized, he’s whitewashed the whole thing!” says Helms, laughing. “He has this, like, wonderful fond memory, which I think is a very human thing. We all do that.
“Rusty doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Helms continues. “He has a lot of the same repression and denial his father had, and he’s a little blind to the wants and needs of his wife and kid. And that, I think, was Clark Griswold’s most strident and also most hilarious trait. He steamrolls his family – with the best intentions, but just getting it wrong and then trying desperately to recover every time.”
Like virtually every comic actor of his generation, Helms reveres the original Vacation.
“I was about eight or nine when it came out,” he says, “and, yeah, its impact on me can’t be overstated. I related so much to the family dynamic in the movie, because I’m one of three kids and we took lots of road trips together. And also, just comedically, it’s really one of those movies that informed what I wanted to do with my life, the career that I wanted to chase. It’s why I do what I do.”
Another bonus to making Vacation: as Rusty Griswold, Helms gets to exist in a universe that has Chevy Chase in it and even act alongside his idol.
“He was so collaborative and fun,” Helms says. “It was a blast.”
Was he tempted to steal anything from Chase’s performance once they started working together?
“That was about a month in,” he says, “so [the cast] already had a pretty established vibe, and Rusty was pretty well established. But when Chevy showed up, we could find just little facial expressions and things that Rusty could copy. It was just little mannerisms that popped out. That was great.”
It does seem like perfect father-and-son casting. Helms’s defining quality in the Hangover trilogy was the twitchy, panicky energy of a guy who’s trying to be the most civilized person in the room but can’t always pull it off. With Rusty, it’s filtered through an additional layer of awkwardness and shame.
“I think that’s a really wonderful description!” he says. “I hadn’t heard it put that way. I like it.”
See our review of the film here.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
