New on DVD

By Sean Axmaker
Special to MSN Movies

Remember loading your friends into the car and driving off for an impromptu getaway? And it didn't matter where?

Remember driving all night with someone special to a little out-of-the-way place on the beach/in the mountains/tucked away in the woods for a private weekend getaway?

Remember when the entire family piled into the car for a driving vacation to Disneyland or Yellowstone or Wally World or wherever the family vacation was set?

It seems like another era when you could take a coast-to-coast road adventure without having to take out a second mortgage to pay for the gas. How can you feed that wanderlust when just looking at an SUV creates a sucking sound in your wallet?

We have a solution: You don't have to drive any farther than your local video store to travel vicariously by road movie, the latest incarnation of a literary tradition that goes back to "The Odyssey." It's in the immigrant story, the wagon train journey, the Western and the frontier drama, and it's all over American literature. Huck and Jim travel by raft down the river, the original American roadway, in "Huckleberry Finn." But the 20th century brought an all-new dimension with the automobile and highway. What was once an adventure, a rebellion, an escape, became a rite of passage and more. The road trip was our American birthright. "See the USA in your Chevrolet," went the invitation in the old TV commercial, a promise as much as a sales pitch. The road movie became the cinematic expression of travel and freedom, an escape to the abandon of the open road and the momentum of migration, if only for a couple of hours.

Here's our itinerary for the great American road trips you can take without leaving your couch, let alone filling your gas tank.

On the Road
In the rite-of-passage romance of hitting the road with a buddy, the destination was often optional. In "Easy Rider," it was almost arbitrary, a fantasy of finding paradise in Key West. Hippie bikers Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper aren't exactly Kerouac's beatnik heroes -- they finance their back-road tour of the country with a cocaine sale, an act that seems to sour their idealism before the trip even begins -- but the film presents their motorcycle journey as a liberating flight down the two-lane blacktops of rural America, from the arid western desert to the oppressive backwoods of the Deep South. Acceptance gives way to intolerance, and their illusion of freedom crashes into the grim disillusion of the climax. Needless to say, they never quite make it to paradise. As far as that goes, neither do "Thelma & Louise," who head off for a weekend getaway and end up outlaws escaping to the mythological landscape of Utah's Canyonlands and Arizona's Monument Valley. The limitless possibility of the open road becomes a dead end, a choice between incarceration and oblivion. They choose to go out like a modern Butch and Sundance, with the convertible as their chariot to a very grim kind of freedom. With a destination like that, it pays to stay home.

More hopeful is "Sideways," a meandering tour of California vineyards. It's a road movie powered by desperation (Paul Giamatti's frustration and regret; and buddy Thomas Haden Church's last gasp of reckless, random sex before tying the knot) and lubricated with wine. This is a perfect journey to take from the comfort of your own living room; you can match their wine consumption glass for glass without having to pick a designated driver. Just south of the border (but still in North America), Alfonso Cuaron's "Y Tu Mama Tambien" is a coming-of-age road movie that charts a last blast of youthful irresponsibility. When sex-obsessed, dope-smoking high school buddies Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna hit the road with sexy, worldly older woman Maribel Verdu, it looks like just another raunchy American sex fantasy, but Cuaron gives these urban boys from Mexico City an eye-opening odyssey through a countryside that is as foreign to them as it is to any gringo viewer.

Romance on the Road
The tradition of love on the road wasn't invented in Frank Capra's "It Happened One Night," but he set the bar when he threw together Clark Gable (the brash, smart-talking reporter) and Claudette Colbert (the spoiled runaway heiress) and fanned the sparks of their clashing personalities into a roaring fire of a romance. These lovers don't have their own wheels, it should be said. They take buses, hitch rides (the blithely sexy Colbert shows the cocky smooth operator Gable that a little leg beats a trained thumb any day), even liberate a jalopy from a scoundrel. That's one way to avoid the high price of gas. Tramping is the preferred method of travel in "Sullivan's Travels," Preston Sturges' comedy of a rich Hollywood director (Joel McCrea) determined to find the human condition by riding the rails and walking the bread lines of Depression-era America. His studio handlers follow in a luxury camper. They get the deluxe accommodations, McCrea gets the girl; Veronica Lake is so impressed by his authenticity and determination that she joins his quest and falls for the big lug.

Alfred Hitchcock put his spin on the road romance with "North by Northwest," a cross-country flirtation that comes close to killing suitor Cary Grant. Eva Marie Saint is the femme fatale with an Achilles' heel: She comes to love her charming patsy. In games of false identities and undercover work, real feelings are as dangerous as a killer crop-duster chasing a man across a corn field. Once again, cars play little part in this road romance, though Grant faces one marvelous nightmare behind the wheel when the bad guys fill him with liquor and then send him careening down a winding mountain road. For a younger spin on the road romance, check out "The Sure Thing" with John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga as opposites stuck hitchhiking across the country when their bickering gets them booted out of their ride. Which brings up the question: Can you find love on the road if you drive your own car?

The Family Vacation
The SUV and the minivan seem to be the transportation of choice in the modern family road trip; just check out "Johnson Family Vacation," "Are We There Yet?" and "College Road Trip," the most recent entries in the genre. But once upon a time the station wagon was the classic middle-class vehicle for the nuclear family. Chevy Chase piles his brood into just such a land cruiser to take the Griswold brood on "National Lampoon's Vacation." Their destination is Wally World, a second-rate Disneyland (which seems so appropriate for this bargain family vacation), but their Route 66 trip from Chicago to Los Angeles makes stops for family (with a hilariously morbid payoff) and natural wonders (once again with the Southwest iconography of Monument Valley, here less Western mythology than Road Runner cartoon) between the obligatory disasters. "Little Miss Sunshine," a contemporary entry in the genre, piles modern family dysfunctions (tightly wound control-freak dad, exasperated mom, son with a vow of silence, suicidal uncle, and sex-mad grandpa with a secret heroin habit) into the retro discomfort of a VW van with a hinky clutch. The group-hug ending is inevitable but it's a fun trip to togetherness. And they hit upon a gas-saving solution: the push start. More than mechanical necessity, it's a family bonding activity.

Going It Alone
You don't have to pair up or pile in to hit the road. The solo journey can be just as illuminating. Richard Farnsworth is a kind of septuagenarian "Easy Rider" on a John Deere riding mower, putt-putting across two states to see his estranged brother in "The Straight Story," a gently and sweetly offbeat odyssey from David Lynch. It's the director's only G-rated, family-friendly film, and as affectionate a tour of the American heartland as you'll find, filled with oddball moments of weirdness and wonder and grounded by the withered wisdom and reflexive generosity of Farnsworth's frail but firm old codger. Bill Murray takes a different kind of family trip in "Broken Flowers." He's an aging Don Juan trying to find the son he never knew he had by revisiting his old lovers. As in most road movies, he learns more about himself than the object of his search, and the film becomes a bittersweet tour of what might have been but for his inability to commit to anyone in his life. The journey to self is even more awkward in "About Schmidt," with Jack Nicholson as a repressed widower who hits the road to stop his daughter from marrying a doofus and meets a cross-section of America along the way -- and unerringly fails to connect with anyone.

We're on the Road to Nowhere
Not all journeys end up where they're supposed to ... or anywhere at all. "Two-Lane Blacktop," the great American existential road movie, ostensibly follows a cross-country contest between a pair of street racers (James Taylor and Dennis Wilson), who live out of their stripped-down, primer-gray Chevy, and a middle-aged drifter (Warren Oates) in a GTO, who spins a new story for every passenger he picks up. To call them gypsies is to romanticize their hollow lives; these guys are disconnected from everything except their ride as they drift through the back roads of America, living from bet to bet. These roads go everywhere and lead nowhere. They could be the children of Barry Newman, the "last free man on Earth," in "Vanishing Point," another car film as existential allegory. This one revels in the doomed romance of the loner renegade flouting conservative law and thumbing his nose at "the man" (all those state troopers determined to end his ride on the freedom road), and Newman is appropriately blank and taciturn as the world-weary hero, popping amphetamines as he speeds through that now awfully familiar Southwest desert landscape. What is it about the desert and existential crisis? A lot less weighty and far more droll is "Stranger Than Paradise," Jim Jarmusch's lovingly photographed travelogue of urban blight, industrial blah and rural nothingness. "You know, it's funny," remarks an underwhelmed traveling buddy. "You come to someplace new and everything looks just the same."

Riding the Rainbow
I can't think of a better way to end this tour through the American road movie than with the warmest, funniest, most inclusive road trip ever journeyed on-screen: "The Muppet Movie." There is a rainbow connection to "The Wizard of Oz," of course, as Kermit the Frog picks up traveling companions along his yellow brick road to Hollywood. But the end of their rainbow isn't smarts or heart or courage or even fame. It's friendship and camaraderie: "Getting there is half the fun, come share it with me!" This is the road movie with something for old and young, cynics and optimists, lovers and dreamers and me and you.

What are your favorite road movies? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com

Sean Axmaker is a film critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a DVD columnist for MSN Entertainment, and a contributing writer to GreenCine.com, Turner Classic Movies Online, and Asian Cult Cinema, among other publications.

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