“Trading Places” and the challenge of troubling art of the past

It is New Year’s Eve, and bawdy revellers are enjoying a fancy-dress party on an American train; in the baggage compartment is a caged gorilla in the care of two doofus handlers. “Trading Places”, John Landis’s rags-to-riches (and vice versa) comedy of 1983, is often considered a Christmas movie, but it is really a story about, and for, the turn of the year. The film is a Janus-faced contradiction, reaching backwards to old prejudices yet in other ways modern. It is a salutary new year’s object lesson in the reassessment of troubling art.