140 Character Movie Review – #140RVW
Hughes’ greatest is arguably the most important film about teenage life. There were better, there were earlier, but none better earlier…
Spoiler-free Movie Review of The Breakfast Club:
The early John Hughes pictures, the ones that really created the classification “John Hughes movie” are widely considered to make up an arc of six films or two high school trilogies made in an astoundingly short four years from 1984 to 1987:
- The first trilogy were the first three movies he directed in addition to writing; Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Weird Science
- The second trilogy is made up of the next three pictures he wrote, of which he directed only the middle one; Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Some Kind of Wonderful
Personally, I prefer the breakdown created by Art3mis in Ready Player One:
“Her newest blog post was titled “The John Hughes Blues,” and it was an in-depth treatise on her six favorite John Hughes teen movies, which she divided into two separated trilogies: The “Dorky Girl Fantasies” trilogy (Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and Some Kind of Wonderful) and the “Dorky Boy Fantasies” trilogy (The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off).”
But however you choose to look at them, these six films really do make up a fairly complete statement on Hughes’ power to give voice to the (white, middle class) teenager. Hughes as both a writer and director was so much more than his teen movies, but there is unquestionably a solid body of work during those years in which his pictures maintained a strong theme. It was an impressive run, and if his name has become shorthand for a type of film, it’s a compliment and in no way meant to diminish his other considerable features.
I caught almost all of these films after the fact. The only one of his pictures that I ever saw in the theater was Ferris Bueller. I was just a bit young for some of them. I still remember being on a hike with the Scouts when the other boys were excited to see The Breakfast Club and astonished at my indifference. I was still into baseball and baseball cards and baseball and Star Wars figures and baseball. Life changes so quickly in those tween/teen years, which is of course what Hughes understood so well.
I don’t know if The Breakfast Club is the best picture in the group, but I’d argue that it’s certainly the most “important” or culturally significant.
Initially the film was supposed to be Hughes’ directorial debut. After the massive twin 1983 successes that he wrote, Mr. Mom & National Lampoon’s Vacation, he had enough juice to get his shot at directing a film, but not an hour and a half one room play of five teenagers talking, which The Breakfast Club certainly is.
It’s almost certainly a good thing that he made Sixteen Candles first. Aside from the practical considerations of learning how to make a picture, he developed relationships with two of his most storied leads, Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall that allowed for the trust necessary to deal with the much heavier topics of the 1985 film. The success of Sixteen Candles also allowed the director some small degree of pull and enhanced the audience for The Breakfast Club.
While the picture retains many of the director’s trademarks, the film is significant in the development of the filmmaker in that it strips away a lot of those elements that would define his work. Shot entirely in sequence on more or less one set, the picture eschews the jump cuts and breaking of the fourth wall that would feature so prominently in his other works. The screenplay was workshopped like a play through multiple rehearsals before filming, yet was still full of ad libs, including the soul-baring scene in which each character explains why they are in all-day detention.
Music was always an enormous part of his films, but other than the legendary theme song, the soundtrack is forgettable and doesn’t factor hugely into the action – which makes sense considering the detention hall setting.
Is The Breakfast Club the best film made about teenage life? I don’t know. Depends on the definition. There are better all around films that portray teens realistically and with insight, but as a film that is exclusively about teenagers, you’d have to say yes. No film better depicted more accurately and refreshingly what it was like to be a teenager. At the time, anyway. You could get into a whole discussion about how poor the representation is outside of white, middle class, middle Americans. Hughes did this deliberately, by the way; he wanted all of the characters to be physically similar while he established the stereotypes so the character of the individuals would project beyond those labels as the script trashed them.
So there is certainly a legitimate argument to be made that while this film speaks deeply to some of us, it’s only to some of us. I’d like to think that’s not the case. The themes of familial discord, struggling with expectations, peer pressure, self-identification – these are universal, even if the circumstances present themselves differently.
The reason the film passes the sniff test to me is that if you pose the question, “would this film be just as meaningful if you remade it with today’s teens, or with an all Indian cast, or set in Compton or Paris or with hearing impaired teens?”, the answer is a resounding yes.
The film moves along surprisingly swiftly, as I’m sure everyone was concerned it would be too talky and slow. Still, I would love to see a director’s cut of the picture some day. Even though Hughes was taken far too early, there’s a lot of documentation of some of the cut scenes that would be very interesting to watch.
I just realized that I haven’t even mentioned the performances, which are all wonderful. I have a certain fondness for Hall & Ringwald in particular, knowing that they were the only ones actually high school aged at time of filming. Their journey is the most believable accordingly. But Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson all turn in career highlight performances, and character actors Paul Gleason & frequent Hughes collaborator John Kapelos really do give some humanity to what would otherwise be featureless adults.
Finally, a newly restored The Breakfast Club was just released on Blu-Ray and is getting a two-night event screening tonight, March 26 and again on March 31, 2015. Details at http://www.breakfastclub30.com/
30 years later, The Breakfast Club remains in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions: a masterpiece.
Trailer:
Bechdel Test:
Pass
The Representation Test Score: C (5 pts)
(http://therepresentationproject.org/grading-hollywood-the-representation-test/)
| Main Cast | Emilio Estevez Andrew Clark, Judd Nelson John Bender, Molly Ringwald Claire Standish, Ally Sheedy Allison Reynolds |
| Rating | TV-14 |
| Release Date | Fri 15 Feb 1985 UTC |
| Director | John Hughes |
| Genres | Comedy, Drama |
| Plot | Five high school students, all different stereotypes, meet in detention, where they pour their hearts out to each other, and discover how they have a lot more in common than they thought. |
| Poster |  |
| Runtime | 97 |
| Tagline | They only met once, but it changed their lives forever. |
| Writers | John Hughes (written by) |
| Year | 1985 |
