Pretty In Pink

by Jonathan Bernstein

  I have only good things to say about Pretty in Pink. Strip away the pastel colors and the hip Brit sound track and it’s an old-fashioned romance that functions beautifully. Howard Deutch’s hand on the tiller frees the movie from John Hughes’ predilection for slapstick and abrupt shifts in mood, making it the most cohesive of all his teen-aimed output. Molly Ringwald may have been saddled with the part of a saint but she dug deep into her armory of pained reactions, flinching, wincing, blushing and gasping with enough conviction to fully merit her brief ascendancy to Everygirl status. Even Annie Potts, whose part is otherwise excess to requirements, has a bright shining moment when she gets to deliver the line that ranks as runner-up to “When you grow up, your heart dies.” Made nostalgic by Andie’s prom preparations, she sighs. “Why can’t we start old and get younger?” Strange to think that a song by a group as seedy and unsentimental as the Psychedelic Furs inspired a film as sweet and sappy as this.

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  “Adamly, Adamowski, Adamson, Adler, Anderson, Bueller … Bueller … Bueller … Bueller … Bueller…” Just like Bonnie Tyler, the Hughes movies were holding out for a hero. After filling his films with the neglected, the abused, the neurotic, the anal, the demented, the despised, the vulnerable, the lonely and the lost, it was time to roll out a teen Terminator. Hot on the heels of forays into the realms of comedy, drama, science fiction and romance, Hughes went for broke with his Kane, his Godfather, his Malcolm X, his epic: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986).

  In Matthew Broderick’s Ferris Bueller, he gives us a mythic figure, an angst-free adolescent brimming, to an almost unbearable degree, with confidence and resilience. Adults and authority figures are, to him, no more than video-game villains vainly attempting to impede his progress to the next level. Not only is he unmarked by the parental pressures that crippled every other kid in the Hughes canon, but he is, in point of fact, a master manipulator of mom and dad. This is borne out in the opening seconds of the movie where his folks fret over his still, sweating form. They demand that he spend the day recuperating, much to the chagrin of his embittered he-gets-away-with-everything-it’s-not-fair sister Jeannie (pre–nose job Jennifer Grey). “If I was bleeding out my eyes, you guys’d make me go to school,” she kvetches. Once the coast is clear, Ferris bounces out of bed, exclaiming, “Incredible. They bought it. One of the worst performances of my career and they never doubted it for a second.”

  Cranking some cutting-edge Sigue Sigue Sputnik—remember, this is 1986—he makes the camera his confidante, delivering his spiel like a seasoned Borscht Belt traveler. “The key to faking out the parents is the clammy hands. It’s a good nonspecific symptom.… Fake a stomach cramp and when you’re doubled over moaning and wailing, just lick your palms. It’s a little childish and stupid, but then, so is high school.” He then adopts a demeanor of infomercial sincerity to deliver his justification for bailing. “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

  This philosophy is in no way shared by his best friend Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck) who is, in every way, Ferris’ opposite. Cameron is basically every fucked-up Hughes ensemble staple rolled into one whining ball. He’s so hopeless and oppressed, so poleaxed by fear, depression and a myriad of imaginary ailments, he can’t even get out of bed. “Pardon my French”‘ says Ferris, “but Cameron is so tight that if you stuck a lump of coal up his ass, in two weeks you’d have a diamond.” Ferris, though, has a Saturn salesman’s skill in persuading people around to his point of view and the pale, skinny Cameron, permanently tensed to expect the worst, is soon on board for the big day off.

  Ferris has, apparently, stopped to look around on some nine occasions this semester, severely testing the patience and credulity of Dean of Students Edward R. Rooney (Jeffrey Jones, master of the slow burn). This latest bout of absenteeism hits Ed where he lives. “What’s so dangerous about a character like Ferris Bueller is that he gives good kids bad ideas,” he tells his assistant Grace (dingbat nonpareil Edie McClurg). “He’s very popular, Ed,” she informs him. “The sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, buds, dweebies, wastoids, they all adore him.” It’s early in the day but Ferris has already established himself as the Bugs to Ed’s Fudd, the Road Runner to his Coyote. First, he wipes his attendance record from the dean’s files via computer, then he breaks his slinky girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara, briefly rescuing her career from the wreckage of Ridley Scott’s Legend) out of the big house.

  Lacking a set of wheels (“I asked for a car and I got a computer, how’s that for being born under a bad sign?”) and unwilling to devalue their day of leisure tooling around in Cameron’s piece of shit, Ferris is aroused by the presence of Old Man Frye’s vintage Ferrari. “My father loves this car more than life itself,” moans Cameron. “A man with priorities so far out of whack doesn’t deserve such a fine automobile,” retorts the smug felon, easing himself into the driver’s seat and shuddering with pleasure. He rolls the vehicle out of its showcase shrine. Cameron is forced to run after the car (whose license plate reads NRVOUS).

  “I did not achieve this position in life by having some snot-nosed punk leave my cheese out in the wind,” says Rooney, by now fixated on making an example of this fugitive. “Fifteen years from now when he looks back at the ruin his life has become, he’s going to remember Edward Rooney.”

  For his day on the town, Ferris becomes a pitchman for the Chicago Tourist Board, dragging babe and buddy up the Sears Tower, to Wrigley Field, a museum, a swank restaurant (where he pulls his “I’m Abe Frohman, the sausage king of Chicago” prank) and finally to the German-American Appreciation Day parade where he commandeers a float, serenades Cameron with “Danke Schoen” and then leads the thronged city streets in a rousing rendition of “Twist and Shout.” Ed Rooney’s day does not go so swimmingly. First he nabs the wrong victim (“Les joux sont faits. Translation: the game is up. Your ass is mine,” he says to the back of someone who turns, reveals herself not to be his prey, regards him with derision, then sucks up a strawful of Pepsi and hoses him down). Then he turns up at the lovely Bueller estate where he loses his shoe in the garden mulch, gets attacked by the family dog and is finally kicked into unconsciousness by Jeannie Bueller, who mistakes him for a prowler.

  Up to this point, Ferris Bueller is A Good Time. It totally achieves the two-pronged objectives of the genre: it makes the teenage sector of the audience exult in the triumphs of one of their own and it brings out a twinge of nostalgia in those outside the demographic. But Hughes is fully in the driver’s seat, which means that it’s only a matter of time before the film goes skidding off the main drag into some uncharted territory. That moment comes when Ferris looks at the odometer and realizes that the friendly parking lot attendants have taken the chariot for a joyride. “Here’s where Cameron goes berserk,” Ferris tells us. Not just ballistic, Cameron falls into a state of catatonia, during which time Ferris reveals that his motives for press-ganging his friends into his day off were less anarchic than altruistic. “All I wanted to do was give him a good day,” says Ferris of the vegetable formerly known as Cameron.

  “We’re going to graduate in a couple of months and then we’ll have the summer. He’ll work and I’ll work, we’ll see each other at night and the weekends. Then he’ll go to one school and I’ll go to another. Basically, that will be it.” Yup, it’s “When you get old, your heart dies” time again. Ferris has been attempting to install in his friend the fearlessness and lust for life that runs through his own veins before he stumbles unprepared into the looming, corrupting adult world. And there’s something else: “Cameron has never been in love. At least no one’s ever been in love with him. If things don’t change for him he’s going to marry the first person he lays and she is going to treat him like shit, because she will have given him what he has built up in his mind as the end-all, be-all of human existence. She won’t respect him, because you can’t respect someone who kisses your ass.” Jesus, enough already. If that’s the case, and
it has been in no way alluded to up to this point, why not have the poor bastard meet a girl? The madness continues when Cameron stages what appears to be a suicide attempt, letting himself fall into a swimming pool. As the horrified Ferris tries to revive him, Cameron grins, revealing it was all a prank. Immediately, the three friends start splashing around happily in the pool.

  Hughes’ treatment of the slit-eyed mass of resentment that is Jeannie Bueller is considerably smarter. Hauled into the cop shop on the grounds of making a prank phone call (Ed Rooney scrambled out of the Bueller home as she was reporting his presence), she’s sat next to a bleary-eyed substance abuser (Charlie Sheen, throwing himself into the part again). His hoodlum looks and incisive character appraisal (“Your problem is you. You want to spend a little more time dealing with yourself and a little less thinking about your brother”) make giggling mush of her.

  The Cameron Saga reaches an indigestible climax as he does some primal scouring. “I sort of watched myself from inside. I realized it was ridiculous, worrying, wishing I was dead, all that shit, I’m sick of it. This was the best day of my life.” Then he finds that their attempt to reverse the odometer has failed. His father will know he’s touched the car! Rather than reduce him to nervous trepidation, the prospect sets him ablaze. “I gotta take a stand. I’m bullshit. I gotta take a stand against him. I am not going to sit on my ass as the events that affect me unfold and determine the course of my life. I’m going to take a stand and I’m going to defend it.” With that he lets fly at the car, kicking it, unleashing the pent-up frustration. “Who do you love? Who do you love? You love a car!” Standing back, breathless, he stares at the fender he’s just dented. “Good. My father will come home and he’ll see what I’ve done and he’ll have to deal with me. I don’t care … I can’t wait to see the look on the bastard’s face.” Then the car crashes off its stand and rolls out the back of the showroom window, falling to the ground far below. Stunned, the trio survey the wreckage of the formerly sumptuous Ferrari. Ferris quickly volunteers to take the heat for him. But Cameron knows this is his moment, his once in a lifetime. Shot in adoring close-up, he demands his right to take the heat. “I want it and I’m going to take it. When Maurice comes home, he and I will have a little chat. It’s cool. It’s going to be good.” Free at last! Free at last! At the risk of repeating myself, why not have the poor bastard meet a girl? That would have been considerably more beneficial to the movie’s last-days-of-innocence theme and would have contributed a lot more to Cameron’s self-worth than the symbolic destruction of his oppression.

  It’s a sign of how exasperating a filmmaker John Hughes often was that he could have audiences antsy and embarrassed in their seats during the whole Psychology of Cameron segment and then set what seemed like a doomed enterprise back on its feet with an exhilarating ending. After ascertaining that Cameron has sprouted a sufficiently hefty set of cojones to face the future, Ferris is horrified to find the time is 5:55. Five minutes before his parents get home. He races and leaps over the manicured lawns and rolling back gardens of Chicago suburbia. He makes it to the back door with seconds to spare, grabs under the mat for the key, only to find it in the hand of Ed Rooney. “How does another year of high school sound?” Ferris’s reserves of smarm and gift for improvising his way out of tough circumstances both choose this moment to fail him. He’s hanging out to dry when … “We’ve been worried sick about you,” coos Jeannie Bueller. “Go upstairs and get in bed.” She turns to a disbelieving Rooney. “Can you imagine someone as sick as Ferris trying to walk home from the hospital?” She ushers Ferris into the house. “Oh, Mr. Rooney, you left your wallet on the kitchen floor.” She nails him with a vicious smirk of victory, tosses the wallet into the mulch and closes the door to hear Rooney’s yelps as he’s attacked once again by the family mutt. Ferris resumes his prone position nanoseconds before his adoring parents return to make a fuss of him.

  As the credits roll, Ed Rooney trudges, bloody, torn and beyond bitter down the plush suburban streets, little realizing his humiliation is not quite over. The school bus draws up alongside him. He stares at it for a long moment before boarding and sitting next to a little girl who offers him a Gummi Bear (“They’ve been in my pocket. They’re real warm and soft.”). He looks to the heavens for salvation and is answered by the overhead graffiti: “Rooney eats it.” Ferris, a smart-ass to the end, comes out of the bathroom and finds us, the audience, still glued to our seats. “You’re still here? It’s over, go home.”

  In Ferris Bueller, John Hughes’ directorial stance comes perilously close to that of the parent who wants to be your buddy. Consider this: he makes a rowdy, exuberant, bursting-with-energy movie about three kids who skip school to go to a museum. He wants you to root for his leads but also throws in a private worry about their lack of values (“What are you interested in?” says Sloane to Cameron. “Nothing,” he says. “Me neither,” she says, laughing.). And he spends way, way too long fixating on the Cameron problem. The movie’s greatest asset is that planet of charm we call Matthew Broderick.

  The Ferris delineated in the original shooting script is a malign cross between J. M. Barrie’s printed-page, parent-hating Peter Pan and the young hippy-bashing Johnny Rotten. That version of Ferris stared down the camera and sneered “All the old hippies are full of shit.” He smirked, “Some guy whose hair is falling out and whose stomach’s hanging over his belt and everything he eats makes him fart, he looks at someone like me and he thinks, ‘This kid’s young and strong and has a full, rich future ahead of him, what’s he got to bitch about?’ That’s just one reason why I need a day off every now and then.” Ferris, as originally written, dangles very close to James Spader territory, but Broderick imbues the character with playfulness. In fact, his exhibition of the lovable side of a potentially loathsome role served as his groundwork when, a decade later, he made his all-singing, all-dancing Broadway debut in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, where he was basically playing Ferris Bueller smooth-talking his way up the corporate ladder.

  The movie was followed by a spin-off sitcom (with Charlie Schlatter in the title role, and Jennifer Aniston as his sis) which came on hard with the TV Bueller taking a chainsaw to a cardboard stand-up of Matthew Broderick, but quickly expired. Once again, Cameron never got a girl …

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  There are those who fail to concur with my assessment of Pretty in Pink’s revised ending being more emotionally satisfying than the climax as written. Principal among them would seem to be John Hughes and Howard Deutch because Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), their second collaboration, is The Duckman’s Revenge. The setup here initially looks to be a reverse gender Pretty in Pink. It even begins, like Pink, with a literal allusion to the wrong side of the tracks, only this movie’s hero is walking down them, seemingly oblivious to the oncoming locomotive. Batting for Molly Ringwald is Keith (Eric Stoltz, with the same hair color and face full of freckles), the artistically inclined high schooler ill at ease among the rich and vicious. His Duckie is Mary Stuart Masterson’s pugnacious tomboy drummer, Watts. Less blank than Andrew McCarthy, Lea Thompson is the seemingly unattainable dreamgirl, Amanda Jones. Unable to replicate James Spader’s rarefied air of smoothness but hitting the cruelty function with some force, Craig Sheffer is Andrew Loog Oldham … actually, Hughes shelves the Stones references at this point, giving Sheffer’s villain the much less ludicrous name Hardy Jenns.

  Amanda, sick of Hardy’s tomcatting ways, agrees to go out on a date with Keith. Hardy, all smiles, tells Keith (whom he has previously treated with considerably less regard than the shit under his shoes) that the best man won and he’d be honored if, after their big date, he and Amanda would swing by the Jenns palace for a party, his parents being in Europe. Keith later finds out that Hardy is planning to perform drastic reconstructive surgery on him. He also suspects that the lovely Amanda is a pawn in Hardy’s game. What he hasn’t taken into account is that Amanda is a poor girl accepted into high-school high societ
y by dint of her relationship with Hardy. Now that they’re splitsville and she’s taken up with the socially invisible Keith, she’s being frozen out by the vampires she once called friends. Empowered by his notion of Amanda’s treachery, Keith resolves to blow her mind, rock her world and take her on the date of all dates. He withdraws his college fund, accumulated over many years and the subject of his father’s every waking thought, from the bank, blowing it on preparations for the big night. Watts instructs him on a vital component of the date di tutti dates. “This babe has plenty of battle scars … you should consider whether or not you feel you can deliver a kiss that kills.” She offers herself as a warm body on which to practice but withdraws when she realizes that what she wants and what he thinks he wants are two different things.