We went to a museum. We saw priceless works of art. We ate pancreas!

[sovay]

Brief notes on Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1987), the midnight showing of which derspatchel and I just got back from. Matthew Broderick is extraordinarily charming; the film wouldn't function without him. Alan Ruck as Cameron Frye is marvelous and reminded me bizarrely of Joe E. Brown. The fourth-wall-breaking never wears out its welcome.¹ I am not the target audience for '80's teen comedies. The jokes that were funniest to me were either the perfectly timed punch lines ("If you say 'Ferris Bueller,' you lose a testicle."–"Oh, you know him?") or the total left field moments, like the parking garage attendants and the Star Wars music. Whenever the film is focusing on its three teenage protagonists having what they think is an adult and sophisticated day—driving a classy car, eating at a fancy restaurant, visiting an art museum; crashing a parade float—it really works. Ferris' blithe magical realism coexists successfully with Cameron's depressive hypochondria; Mia Sara's Sloan turns out to be as effective a trickster in a tight spot as the boy she loves. Jennifer Grey's Jeannie is sympathetic even before she gets her heel face turn: I can't imagine living with a brother with the apparent power to bend reality to suit his slacking-off, either. Excepting the magnificent Edie McClurg, almost anything involving the adult characters falls cartoonishly flat. It's not really possible for Ferris to be caught and punished in this kind of movie, so the melodramatic suspense is broadly coy rather than clever; the comedy of authority figures running around behaving like buffoons has nowhere to go. The demolition of Rooney eventually started to remind me of how much I hated Home Alone (1990). So half the film is hilarious; the other half is just kind of there. I know how I would have rewritten the script, but I am not John Hughes and I've known that since I bounced off The Breakfast Club (1985). I want to rewatch WarGames (1983) now.

1. Ferris is a more benign manipulator, but the frequent addresses to the audience made me want to pair this movie with Ian McKellen's Richard III (1995). In any case, I can see exactly how a Broadway director could have remembered this film and thought of Broderick as How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying's J. Pierrepont Finch. It's that curling little cat-smile that is never smug; complacency would have been fatal to the character. His monologues are adorable. He's terrible at philosophy, but he is eighteen years old.

Comments

[rosefox]

Edie McClurg is pure solid gold. "They think he's a righteous dude."

What makes Rooney work for me is that he has no idea what movie he's in.

[sovay]

What makes Rooney work for me is that he has no idea what movie he's in.

That's fair. The scene on the phone with the caller we don't yet know is Cameron is brilliant. A lot of the slapstick just doesn't work for me at all.

[rosefox]

Yeah, I'm not usually a fan of slapstick at all, so I'm not sure why it works for me in this--maybe because I imprinted on the movie when I was young. From an objective adult viewpoint, Rooney's imagined world, where he's the lone man who can battle the evil of unabashed truancy, is as sad as it is ludicrous; he's a symbol of all the adults who have ever been confounded by unbiddable teens. We know that's already tragic and pathetic, and it doesn't need the emphasis of him being abused and humiliated. But from teen-me's perspective, it's so satisfying to see an adult who thinks he knows everything--and thinks that gives him the right to transgress boundaries to the point of breaking into a student's house--get a comeuppance.

And I think it's crucial that his comeuppance is totally grounded in the real world, where of course a teen girl has taken self-defense classes and of course his illegally parked car will be towed. I hated Home Alone not least because it lacked internal logic; it's just a couple of hours of people getting smacked around. But every time Rooney fails and suffers, it's for reasons that are real-world solid. He tries to bend reality and reality refuses; he's done in by beautiful mundanity. (As is Ferris: he really is the hero that Rooney desperately longs to be, but the one obstacle he can't overcome is an odometer. Reality will bend for him, mostly because he's learned how to sweet-talk it, but it can only bend so far.)

As a bonus, the arrogant adult man is done in by a teen girl every time. Indirectly he's outsmarted by Ferris, but directly he's soda-squirted by the gamine arcade gamer and then kicked around by Jeannie. I'm totally willing to let myself enjoy that little bit of revenge fantasy.