The one movie Michael Keaton wishes he’d starred in
Outside of a spell in the early 2000s when he largely fell out of the critical eye – perhaps as a consequence or punishment for a disastrous turn as an enchanted snowman in 1998’s Jack Frost – Michael Keaton has sustained a full-to-bursting career careening back and forth between the comedic and the serious. But while outside of this year’s reprisal of the ghost with the most in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, most of his recent work has been more towards the dramatic end of the spectrum, and that’s not how he started out.
In his early years as a struggling actor, Keaton worked as a stand-up comic. So it made sense that his first run of success on the big screen came in roles in madcap comedies like Johnny Dangerously and Mr Mom. It was the latter – Keaton’s first lead role – that first saw him rub shoulders with the filmmaker he wished he’d gotten the chance to work with more.
Chicago native and 1980s culture-setter John Hughes was the screenwriter for Mr Mom, a film with the somewhat stale premise of what if there was a stay-at-home father, based on one time that Hughes himself had to look after his kids while his wife was away. The movie’s eventual success at the box office lead to a studio deal for Hughes, who defined the rest of the decade with classics like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
But it was a Hughes-directed film about bad luck while travelling that Keaton really wanted to be in, as he told The Guardian in 2017: “Aw, man, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, that’s the movie I really wish I’d been in!”
The movie showcases Steve Martin as a workaholic yuppie trying to get from New York City to Chicago in time for his family’s Thanksgiving celebration and ending up taking the most circuitous route possible in the dubious company of a gold-hearted loudmouth played by John Candy. It’s not clear which role Keaton was pitching for in his head, but his history of comedy and drama could see him fill the shoes of either Martin’s straight man or Candy’s clown. “I would have loved to have worked with him. That would have been an experience.”
Keaton believes Hughes got a bad rap back in the ’80s, despite making films that so accurately captured the pains of America at the time: “Do you remember when people would write off John Hughes and those movies he made? I mean, if you look at the specificity of John Hughes’ direction in those movies, it’s incredible,” he continues. “These weren’t just cute little movies; these were about the economy, employment, unemployment, small towns.”
At its heart, Planes, Trains and Automobiles is a film about the burgeoning respect Martin has for Candy – the white-collar prig coming around to the warmth and heart of a working-class man he initially writes off as boorish and irritating. It’s a film intent on exploring the overlooked towns of the Rust Belt and American Midwest, areas where rising automation and the decline of the iron and steel industry were casting an economic pall.
Hughes has been accused of imbuing his films with a pro-Reagan sheen, but journalist PJ O’Rourke argued that Hughes political worldview was more concerned with avoiding the demonisation of the American middle class he’d felt in the latter half of the 20th century. That’s a philosophy quite obviously baked into Planes, as Martin’s coastal elite slowly comes to understand and show affection for his blue-collar companion.
Growing up himself in the Rust Belt bastion of Pittsburgh as the youngest of seven children, it makes sense why these themes resonated with Keaton. Unfortunately, Hughes passed away in 2009 from a heart attack, meaning audiences will never see what a Hughes-directed Keaton performance could have been.
