Thoughts on The Breakfast Club

via Giphy

“Hey, homeboy … what do you say we close that door? We’ll get the prom queen impregnated.”

Right from its release, people have noticed the play-like structure of The Breakfast Club. Writer-director John Hughes used a reliable formula. Get a group of individuals, preferably hostile or at least insular, and thoroughly break down their defenses. Critics mentioned how Hughes was emulating O'Neill and Albee. He actually came closest to James Kirkwood Jr. and Nicholas Dante.

The Breakfast Club is to teen movies what A Chorus Line is to musicals. A fascinating concept is wed to unsophisticated storytelling and a gimmick that stretches credibility. It's not a bad thing that athlete Andrew (Emilio Estevez), brain Brian (Anthony Michael Hall), criminal Bender (Judd Nelson), princess Claire (Molly Ringwald) and basket case Alison (Ally Sheedy) bare their souls so thoroughly while passing nine hours in detention and giving more thought than one would expect to the question of who they are. It's just that talking about themselves is pretty much all they do. Even when they're not talking about themselves, they're talking about themselves.

“My God, are we gonna be like our parents?”

“Not me … ever …”

“It’s unavoidable, it just happens.”

“What happens?”

“When you grow up, your heart dies.”

“Who cares?”

“I care …”

(Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf ...?)

While I cringe at Hughes' more condescending work, I am curious how The Breakfast Club would have worked if he wrote and directed it with less affection for the five leads. Yes, Hughes wasn't shy about showing how deeply damaged they all are from poor parenting and an insensitive high school culture. But a little too often, the characters are all but saying, "It's not my fault, it's society!" Ask yourself: would or could Hughes be so indulgent with Vernon (Paul Gleason)?

Over the past six years, I've viewed and revisited several of John Hughes' movies. The Breakfast Club is the one I was least looking forward to. I remembered it as tedious and exhausting. This most recent viewing softened my attitude.

The storytelling is crude, but the emotion is genuine. The Breakfast Club is what John Hughes did for love.

“Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us — in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain …”

“… and an athlete …”

“… and a basket case …”

“… a princess …”

“… and a criminal …”

“Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.”

Recommended with reservations.

Thoughts:

— “You’re a neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie. What would you be doing if you weren’t out making yourself a better citizen?”

— Box Office: Grossing nearly $46 million on a $1 million budget, this opened at No. 3 and came in at No. 16 for 1985.

— Snubs Watch: “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” failed to be nominated for a Golden Globe or Academy Award. To be fair, most of the Oscar and all of the Golden Globe song nominees were hit songs. Topping the Billboard charts, as “Don’t You” did in May 1985, didn’t guarantee awards recognition.

— The Breakfast Club is the first of two movies on this year’s docket featuring choreography by Dorain Grusman. The other is Fright Night. Grumman’s work includes Kids Incorporated, Troop Beverly Hills and Sweatin’ to the Oldies, Volumes 2 and 3. I am looking at the “We Are Not Alone” sequence with new eyes!

— Fanservice Junction: Hall was really cute in this movie. I first saw The Breakfast Club when I was 12, and the crush never really went away, so it's totally not icky for me to say this, right?

— Critic’s Corner, the movie: “This film is not only about high school detention, it is similar to it,” Duane Byrge wrote in The Hollywood Reporter. Pauline Kael: “The movie is about a bunch of stereotypes who complain that other people see them as stereotypes.” “It’s just the old sentimental saw about how, beneath our differences, we’re all just, you know, people,” Paul Attanasio wrote. “It’s often a weirdly preachy movie,” according to Michael Wilmington, Los Angeles Times. “What it needs is more honest rebellion, something loser and wilder.” Roger Ebert, on the outer hand, called it “an honest attempt to create teenagers who might seem plausible to other teenagers.”

— Critic’s Corner, the quintet: “An all-star cast, as younger actors go,” Ebert wrote. Janet Maslin: “(They) would have mixed well even without the fraudulent encounter group candor.” They brought more conviction than perhaps deserved to their parts, according to David Ansen, Newsweek.

— Reading multiple appraisals of Estevez, et al. results in a Rorschach test-like experience. 

• Estevez: He’s the only one who gave a fully realized, practically perfect and always in character performance, Wilmington wrote. Attanasio felt he was trying too hard to play a kid and ended up coming across bland. Denby found him a touching actor who should be moving into leading roles.

• Hall: “He has a weird, jittery comic timing, but when he has to play his Big Scene,” the emotionalism comes in a vacuum,” Attanasio wrote. Byrge, however, felt his innocent and earnest naïveté resulted in one of the best youth portrayals in recent films. And Denby felt he pulled off the “bravura emotional scene.”

• Nelson: “He can’t help but get on the other characters’ nerves, and on the audience’s, too,” Maslin wrote. Wilmington: “There’s something unconvincing, posturing, about his rebellion.” Attanasio: “… roars and postures but never strikes a true note.”

• Ringwald: She and Hall were the standout performers for Maslin and People. The magazine felt both had the gifts for movie stardom. Byrge: “Ringwald, alternately snide and simple-minded, opens a dimension of endearing vulnerability in her role.” Denby’s review was perhaps accidentally the harshest. He didn’t refer to Molly’s performance, just her January 1985 appearance in Vanity Fair.

• Sheedy: She still managed to be appealing with an unplayable character, Maslin wrote. She gave the performance of her career to date, according to Attanasio. It was overwrought and seemingly amateurish, Byrge wrote.

— Critic’s Corner, Hughes: “He taps into the egocentricity of adolescent with more sensitivity than any of his colleagues,” People wrote. “But Hughes doesn’t just understand today’s teenagers: he enshrines them, suggesting that their problems are more important than nuclear war or anything else in the world.” “This film maker is, spookily, inside kids,” Richard Corliss wrote in Time. “He knows how the ordinary teenagers, the ones who don’t get movies made about them, think and feel.” Ansen: “Hughes may deserve more plaudits as a social worker than a filmmaker, but you have to admit his hokey situation plays.”

— This time, there’s not one, but two fun examples of the Rule of Three. Both happen when the quintet leaves the library. First Claire and Bender (“… being bad feels pretty good, huh?”), then Brian and Andrew (“You ask me one more question and I’m beating the shit out of you!”).

— I still think the library statue is ugly.

— You didn’t think you’d finish this post without seeing proof of that Ringwald photo shoot, did you? I agree with Denby. The poor girl, 16 at the time, does look “like an elderly Palm Beach matron … like Margaret Dumont trying out for Pretty Baby.”

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— I’m imagining an alternate world where this was a stage production before or rather than becoming a movie. Young actors on Broadway in 1984-85 included Woody Harrelson (who I would cast as Andrew), Jon Cryer (Brian), Steven Weber (Bender), Cynthia Nixon (Claire) and Yeardley Smith (Alison). Discuss.

— Bender might be the bad boy, but it’s Brian and Andrew who racked up the most damages. Breaking a ceiling tile and vandalizing a collection of Molière are small potatoes compared to destroying a locker plus damaging the ones around it and shattering the glass in a library door. The replacement projects probably required work from professionals beyond Carl’s skill. In the abstract sense, we have whatever medical and therapy bills Larry Lester received or is receiving. Finally, if Claire was chronically cutting class, the school could lose some state funding.

— It might be easier to name the young adult-themed shows that haven’t done an homage episode.

— “Yo, waistoid … you’re not gonna blaze up in here!”

— Next: Vision Quest. On deck: The Mean Season.