Is the 1980’s the best decade for cinema?

I’m not saying it is, or that I agree with the sentiment. But I know a lot of folks that would support the notion. It’s a decade full of beloved classics and tons of nostalgic gems. And I’m not going to lie; there’s a lot of comfort food there for me as someone who was born in that age.

And so it is that I find myself going back to the times from my youth to review a movie I somehow missed throughout my whole life. This isn’t the first time I’ve looked back at a John Hughes classic starring Molly Ringwald, though! And I was really just hoping I ended up liking The Breakfast Club more than I did Sixteen Candles. But having seen other Hughes movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off several times in my life, I felt pretty comfortable in assuming Candles was a weird outlier for him.

The Breakfast Club is the story of five teens from Shermer High School in the suburbs of Chicago. On a Saturday in March, all five of them are sentenced to detention, though we do not know why at the start of the film. They are greeted by the principal of the school, Richard Vernon, who plays the hard-ass, take-no-prisoners character immediately with them and tells them they have the whole eight hour day under his watch.

Wait, is that for real? Is detention eight hours long? And on the weekend? I never got detention in school. I’m not even sure I ever thought it was an actual real thing. I know people who got suspended, but never anyone getting “detention”. Huh.

Anyway! The kids are tasked with writing an essay while they are there, but they mostly blow that off to interact and try their best to get out from under Vernon’s iron grip.

I… there’s really not much more of a story synopsis to give. It doesn’t feel like a movie where lots happens. But does that make it bad?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ The crying scene when the five kids are most getting to know each other and discussing if they will still be friends on Monday is extremely well done and emotional, even if they blow right by the fact that Bryan was going to kill himself over getting an F. That’s an undertreated moment that I do wish the film had dedicated more time to before they immediately turned it into a joke (he brought a flare gun to do the deed, and said flare gun blew up his locker).

Still, the scene goes on for some time, and it just gets better and better. All five actors get time to really display their fears, and they all take complete ownership of their characters. Whether it’s Andy’s concerns over being bound to please his father or Claire’s reluctance to talk about her sexual history (or lack thereof) or Alison’s constant and obsessive lying to manipulate others, everyone is phenomenal here. It’s absolutely the best part of the whole flick.

+ Despite being a quintet of pretty basic stereotypes, the characters all feel pretty genuine, and in just over 90 minutes, they are all given a believable backstory and origin for the day’s events. They all feel equally fleshed out and important. There is a marvelous marriage of Hughes’ screenwriting and the actors’ performances that just makes everything work.

Obviously I talked about the late scene where the characters have bonded and are sharing their personal lives, but even before that, they all feel so real. The library detention moments, the escaping through the hallways… when Bryan, Alison, Bender, Andy, and Claire interact at all, we get a true sense of who they are and how they relate to one another. It’s a master class in characterization, this picture.

– The movie spends one (1) scene trying to give some character to Richard Vernon, but it feels a little empty. I guess I applaud the film for giving him any depth at all, but he really spends the rest of the movie being a soulless antagonist. He’s not the real story, and I get that, but I wish he had felt more like a human being than a wall for the characters to eventually break past.

I’m reminded of another older movie I watched recently (but did not end up writing an article on, but maybe soon!) in Fast Times At Ridegemont High. There is a teacher character in that movie who serves as an antagonistic foil to the Jeff Spicolli character. But there, Mr. Hand is treated as a fully realized human being who has a dynamic relationship with our hero. It’s much better handled than Vernon is here, and Hand gets far less screen time.

– The individual characterization of Bryan, Bender, Claire, Alison, and Andy all work and feel fulfilling, but their friendship really seems to come out of nowhere and feels a bit forced. They go from some of them outright despising one another to being allies against Vernon to being friends (and in some cases more than that) at relative breakneck speed. 

It’s really hard to measure how or where the film could have improved here without dragging the runtime out to two hours plus, which would have been excessive. But it does feel like the eventual bonding of the kids is a big enough deal that it should feel more fluid. They randomly decide to get high together when Bender retrieves his stash, and that’s it… they are pals for the day from that point onward.

OVERALL

Ultimately, I really enjoyed this 1980’s classic. The writing and acting are both just so tight and impressive. It’s hard to take cliche characters that should be one-dimensional, but end up making them so human; The Breakfast Club makes it seem effortless. This was an enormous upgrade over Sixteen Candles in just about every regard.