The “genius” actor Michelle Monaghan will always be drawn to
Like most Americans who grew up with the National Lampoon films, Michelle Monaghan is a massive fan of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, the third film in the series of comedies that starred Chevy Chase as Clark Griswold.
Although the first two entries in the franchise were popular, the third film so perfectly captured the chaos of the holiday season that it has become a consistent yearly viewing experience in many households.
During an interview with Rotten Tomatoes, Monaghan said that National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation was one of her five favourite films of all time, and was particularly full of praise for the performance by Chase, a controversial figure who has been engaged in more than a few public feuds, but Monaghan said that she loved his turn as Clark.
“He’s just got a really funny quality about him, and it’s really subtle,” Monaghan said of the actor, “He’s got a little twinkle in his eye. He’s really sort of mischievous. I like him. Just the way he carries himself; he’s really animated without being physical.”
Despite the lauding, the actor admitted to being even more obsessed with a different star of film, and although the character of Audrey Griswold was played by different people in the original Vacation and European Vacation, the role of Clark’s daughter in Christmas Vacation went to Juliette Lewis in one of her earlier roles, which led Monaghan to proclaim that she was “a genius”, and that she would watch “everything that she’s in”.
While many of the most iconic moments in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation involve the shenanigans that Clark and Eddie Johnson, played by Randy Quaid, get into, Lewis has some of the best bits in the film as well, which starts with a hilarious scene in which Audrey and her brother Rusty, played by Johnny Galecki, are forced to help their father pick out a tree to take home for Christmas, and where they begin to realise that nothing about their holiday season is going to be normal.
The yuletide comedy caper may have put Lewis on the map, but it was two years later that she got to truly prove her talents to the industry, when she was cast in Martin Scorsese’s star-studded remake of Cape Fear as Danielle Bowden, the daughter of Nick Nolte’s prosecutor who puts away Robert De Niro, after his returned to the streets. While there was obviously a lot of excitement going into the film to see another collaboration between De Niro and Scorsese, Lewis showed her star power in a performance that earned her an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actress’.
Monaghan’s assessment that Lewis was a “genius” doesn’t feel far-fetched when considering the exciting choices she made in the first decade of her career. Her fearless performance in Natural Born Killers helped to draw even more attention to one of the most controversial films ever made, and she also got to take a dip in the vampire genre when she teamed up with George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino in From Dusk Till Dawn.
In a nice twist of fate, while both actresses have been somewhat underrated throughout their entire careers, they seem to have mounted recent comebacks, with Monaghan drawing some of the best performances of her career with her role in the most recent season of The White Lotus, and Lewis occupying a scene-stealing role in the underrated A24 horror film Opus. Perhaps the stars will align, and they will get the chance to work with one another soon.
