Earn This

Rating: 1.5 stars (out of 4)

There’s probably no more definitive “Brat Pack” movie than St. Elmo’s Fire, which looks as though it’s tried to find screen time for as many of them as possible.  Yet, in terms of quality, one would be much better off locating The Breakfast Club, About Last Night or, really, just about anything else Blockbuster has to offer, for Fire will provide nothing more than some vague nostalgia trip that one might feel from seeing 20somethings pine after their college days.  Pretty much everyone involved in this atrocity exhibition has been better somewhere else, including director Joel Schumacher (A Time to Kill, The Client), which is both uplifting and discouraging to consider as the film plays.

A true ensemble piece with no main character, Fire chronicles a group of seven friends who have just graduated college at Georgetown and enter the “real world” without a clue of how to handle it.  The back cover does a solid job of explaining each person’s role (indeed, it’s more promising than the movie itself).  Billy (Rob Lowe) is the only father of the group, but he acts as though he’s 100% single.  He’s being pursued (sort of) by the shy Wendy (Mare Willingham), whose college roommate Jules (Demi Moore) discourages the interest but otherwise has her own life to screw up.  Meanwhile, Leslie (Ally Sheedy) tries to maintain a relationship with Alec (Judd Nelson), who makes astounding lies about his level of commitment.  Finally, Kirby (Emilio Estevez) and Kevin (Andrew McCarthy) room together and deal with their own separate issues with love.

Many of their problems are intertwined with the others’, which forms an intriguing promise that unfortunately is wholly botched.  The film does a lot of telling, too little showing, and asks viewers to fill in gaps.  We can’t get involved with the characters because, though we hear what they’re going through, we never experience it.  We don’t see why Kirby likes the older woman he knew from college, Dale, (Andie MacDowell) or why Wendy likes Billy, and so we don’t care what happens with them.  Everything seems to come out of nowhere, such as Kevin’s sudden interest in Alec’s girl Leslie (after the film has done an amateurish job of giving him blatant anti-love dialogue), Billy’s random dinner with Wendy’s family, or his late move to New York that requires a group hug-fest as he boards the train.

Fire, to its downfall, is filled with so many scenes that, by bearing no semblance to reality, are impossible to relate to.  There’s a bizarre casualness to Billy’s DUI accident at the film’s opening, which gets brushed aside because the victim has a crush on him.  For his part, Kirby crashes a party Dale is attending, soaking wet from stalking her in the rain and looking patently absurd, and yet she talks to him normally and takes him back to her apartment, without requiring any kind of explanation, as though that sort of thing happens all the time.  There’s also a horrendous scene at the group’s hangout spot (St. Elmo’s bar, naturally), where Billy’s wife intentionally takes another man there to irritate him, causing him to declare that all baby boys should be neutered (?!), before Billy and the missus reunite with a “passionate” embrace in front of a gathering crowd.  Awful, awful, awful.  Nothing in that sequence made sense for any of the characters; it was all contrived plot points, and those didn’t even feel real.

No conflicts in this movie are dealt with in the manner that they should have been.  Take Kevin’s interest in his best friend’s girl.  Why and when did he start liking her?  We have no idea.  Was he feeling any kind of internal conflict or hesitation about stealing Alec’s possible fiancé?  Beats me.  Are we supposed to believe that he betrayed his friend?  Who knows.  And then afterwards, he and Alec don’t actually discuss the matter, as would happen in a mature and intelligent movie; they just have a couple of predictable, yawn-inducing fights and then kiss and make up for no apparent reason (other than the make sure the gang is back together by the end).

That also applies for the supposed “conflict” Wendy feels about her father wanting her marry someone she doesn’t like.  We never hear any kind of sophisticated thoughts about this, just a couple of pat lines and then the inevitable decision that we couldn’t care less about.  Likewise, though everyone seems very concerned about the behavior of Wendy, Jules, and to some extent Kevin, no one matters to do anything about Billy (witness the aforementioned DUI that bothers his friends less than him losing a job).  His behavior towards Jules in one scene in a car is inappropriate, but we can’t really be expected to buy her pain.  When she’s the selfish head case that she is, hearing her say “You break my heart, Billy.  But then again, you break everyone’s heart” with a sad-puppy face rings utterly hollow.

God, this movie annoyed the snot out of me.  Even the title and tagline don’t make sense!  The group hardly ever hangs out at St. Elmo’s (not even close to as important as the bar in About Last Night), and what’s up with “You can always count on your friends. [Even when one sleeps with your girlfriend two hours after you break up?] Don’t ever let the fire go out.” [??]

The actors, for their part, provide expressions that are universally overcooked and all seem vaguely off-target, further hurting our ability to become invested in their lives.  Since most of them have done better work elsewhere, perhaps the greatest blame lies with Schumacher.  Estevez and Nelson were better in The Breakfast Club, Lowe and Moore in Last Night.  Only the ever-adorable Sheedy gets it all right—her acting, as was the case in Breakfast, still seems achingly genuine, from the heart, and all her own.  (They’ve all looked better too, especially Lowe, saddled with effeminate make-up and an earring, and Moore, hiding her attractiveness behind an awful hairstyle and color that doesn’t work for her.)

By the time of the overwrought conclusions to the storylines (Jules’s attempted suicide, Kirby’s goodbye to his girl), the viewer will likely have lost the energy to be offended.

Apologies for the protracted delay from posting that our other contributors have more than made up for.  I will return to the fold with a series of reviews of films and music that have some connection to the theme of graduation, the event that has occupied my time recently.

Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 4)

The Graduate was recommended to me as a classic American film for years, having launched the career of Dustin Hoffman and (supposedly) portrayed the plight of an endless number of post-collegiate guys.  Thus, I was quite surprised to learn that it’s not about much more than a kid who has an affair with the mother of the girl his parents want him to date.  That sums up a large part of its appeal…and limitations: it is an unusual and often wonderfully funny story, but inconsistent and not nearly as dramatic as I half-expected when playing it.

After an opening scene to which Garden State paid homage, The Graduate starts with Ben Braddock (Hoffman) sleepwalking his way through his own post-grad, welcome-home party.  Desperately seeking relief from the endless parade of, you know, grown-ups, he hides out in his room, only to be found by Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), a family friend who needs a ride home.  Ben, in his fidgety, klutzy manner, tries to impress upon Mrs. Robinson the foolishness of such an idea, but she insists.

The following scenes at Mrs. Robinson’s house are some of the most famous in movie history, and they bring out the best in The Graduate.  Everything Mrs. Robinson requests sounds so innocent, unless you place it in context of everything else.  Hoffman’s pitch-perfect approach to the material makes Ben immensely likable without being remarkable in any way; he’s sharper than he projects, but he can’t find the right words or actions to counter Mrs. Robinson’s advances.  When Ben discovers that Mr. Robinson is due home shortly, the scene takes on almost a Shakespearean element of humor, and I applaud the movie for not ruining it by having Mr. Robinson catch Ben.

It was about the point where Ben decided to meet Mrs. Robinson at a hotel that I realized the movie was not going to ever strive for the dramatic setting I anticipated.  That isn’t to say it’s superficial, just that its primary purpose is always to make you laugh.  And it does that well…in spurts, particularly at the scenes at the hotel where Ben plans his trysts.  As he stammers his way through his room request, tries to explain why he has no luggage, or calls Mrs. Robinson from across the lobby, you want to feel sorry for the guy, even though he’s about to do something that would make American Pie-era teenagers tremendously jealous.

He wants to talk about deeper meaning, but she stays clammed up—a dynamic that, given their entrenchment in their positions and the minor difficulty we have in believing that he would want a conversation, grows tiresome.  When they finally do consummate their relationship, he’s really in trouble, because his parents are trying to set him up with…Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine.

After those two start going out, it’s obvious that she’ll find out about her mother.  But even before then, their interactions are awkward; I’m not sure I see the meaning of Ben taking her out to a show with girls dancing provocatively, or why they kiss for the first time after she runs out.  Here, Ben’s lack of social skills makes it hard to accept the attraction.  Mrs. Robinson’s could be chalked up to boredom—with her marriage or life in general—but there is no such explanation here, and this time we need one.

Ben decides one night to bring her to the same hotel where he brought her mother (what is this guy thinking?) and there is a hilarious moment when everyone there recognizes him and addresses him by the name he had previously provided to them.  Given his ineptitude, you know what’s coming, and when the truth comes out, Elaine dumps Ben, and for good measure, the Robinsons leave town—though not before Mrs. Robinson can tell him to stay away from her daughter.  Towards the end, the movie gets not only even more implausible but also a bit muddled.  It’s understandable, for example, that Mr. Robinson would be so furious at Ben, but his wife’s feigned anger rings hollow.  Likewise, the ending feels rushed and inconclusive, with moments like the attempted strangulation and Christ-like posing jolting the tone in scatterbrained directions.

The most enduring image of the movie for me is not the famous line “Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?” but rather the unforgettable shot of Ben sulking around in the enormous wet suit his parents make him wear for a pool party.  The imagery of an isolated and misunderstood young man, breathing Darth Vader-like from the inside of the suit, staring out dimly through the foggy eye holes as he does someone else’s bidding, is unmistakable.  That’s where the strength of The Graduate lies, but it’s also where it fails to extend itself.  I would have rather it played off this idea more strongly, but the film is still worth watching, if primarily for the cultural context and humor.  And let me just say that if my parents want to set me up with someone who looks like Katherine Ross now that I’m out of college, things will not be nearly this complicated.