Movie Review: 30 Years of 'Uncle Buck'

When I was a kid, I thought Uncle Buck was a good movie. Now, it's the perfect illustration of how, though movies don't change, we do. 30 years later, as an adult with taste, and what I hope is a little sophistication, I can look back on Uncle Buck, and Roger Ebert's review of Uncle Buck, which I disliked at the time, and see that Roger was absolutely right, and I was as immature and childish as this movie.

Uncle Buck stars John Candy as the title character, a slovenly, uncivilized, man-child who lives for Cigars and horse racing. Buck has a girlfriend, thanks to Hollywood screenwriters and casting directors, played by Amy Madigan who is forced to dim her own star power and talent so that we can buy that she finds Buck charming enough to have wasted eight years of her life on him.

The plot of Uncle Buck kicks in when Buck's brother, Bob (Garrett M Brown) calls in the middle of the night. Bob and his wife Cindy (Elaine Bromka, in a thankless role), need to attend to family business out of town, and they need someone to watch their three kids. Unemployed Buck is the perfect choice, if only because everyone else they know is unavailable. One hole in the plot is why mom and dad don't just take the kids with them but, oh well.

Buck is that classic 80s sort of character whose lack of common sense is just assumed to be funny. Thus we get a scene where he makes the kind of breakfast for the kids that only an adult like himself would consider eating. If the idea that Buck doesn't have the sense to simply ask children what they might want for breakfast doesn't make you laugh, this is going to be a long movie for you.

And that's the movie. Buck or one of the children, the teenage Tia (Jean Louisa Kelly), middle child Miles (Macauley Culkin) or youngest child Maizy (Gaby Hoffman), says something inappropriate, and the movie pauses for a moment for where a sitcom laugh track is supposed to be, but the laugh never arrives. That's not entirely true, when I was 13 the laughs arrived regularly and John Candy could do no wrong.

That was how I felt when I was 13 years old. John Candy starred in movies I loved like Splash, Spaceballs, and Planes Trains and Automobiles. I still have a soft spot for Splash, though Candy's character today is all sorts of problematic. I still enjoy Spaceballs as well as Mel Brooks' work tends to age better than a lot of comedy out there.

Uncle Buck however, reminded me very much of another John Candy movie that, for me, has not aged well. Years after falling in love with Planes Trains and Automobiles, I tried watching it as an adult, and found it shrill and overwrought to the point of being unwatchable. Watching Candy and co-star Steve Martin flail about and mug for every last laugh today causes the kind of secondhand embarrassment that I find intensely uncomfortable.

Uncle Buck doesn't strain, and is far less desperate than Planes, Trains and Automobiles, but that is only because it is far lazier than Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Writer-Director John Hughes knows he has lowbrow, simpleminded gags that appeal to young, unformed sensibilities to fall back on in Uncle Buck, and thus he doesn't have to work too hard here to make Uncle Buck.

I have been obsessed with movies for more than 30 years. As a pre-teen, I began watching Siskel & Ebert on television, and reading Roger Ebert's reviews in the newspaper at my local library. Even 30 years later I can recall my disappointment when I read Ebert's one star and a half review of Uncle Buck. I wasn't disappointed that the movie might be bad, I was disappointed in Roger for not liking something that I knew that I was going to like.

Indeed, I did like Uncle Buck. I wanted my own Uncle Buck, an avenging angel of anarchic adulthood who righted wrongs while chomping on a Cigar. I can say, Buck's strong morals, at the very least, still kind of hold up. The scenes where he stands up for the kids, either against a school authority, or against a weasel boyfriend, I admired Buck, and he still managed to make me laugh.

It's the rest of Uncle Buck, that lazy reliance on the lowbrow that fails to hold up 30 years later. If the movie needs a joke they always go for the cheap laugh such as having Culkin's child say something inappropriate, or having Buck fall down or break something. There isn't enough movie, plot or compelling characters in Uncle Buck, so 'big guy falls down' or 'child says curse word' becomes the default humor, and the movie stays on default most of the 99 minute run time.

When John Candy died, it was like losing a member of the family. Candy's giant teddy bear persona loomed large in my childhood. Death has a way of suspending our memory, of holding your positive memories in an unchallenged place in your mind. My perception of John Candy will never change, I will always admire him and think of what else he might have achieved had he not died so young.

That said, it doesn't mean that I have to remain in some kind of childish nostalgic state the rest of my life. The reality is that, though Candy remains beloved, Uncle Buck is not a great movie. It's well-intended but deeply lazy. Candy is charismatic and memorable, but nostalgia and Candy's death have created the false notion that Uncle Buck isn't a simpleminded exercise in lowest common denominator humor.

Challenging your preconceived notions, your own nostalgic perceptions is not a bad thing. Part of growing up is giving up on childish things. Uncle Buck, for me is one of those childish things. It's not a betrayal of John Candy's memory or legacy for me to finally see Uncle Buck for the shabby, malformed, comedy it is.