My love/hate relationship with 'The Breakfast Club' continues

The Breakfast Club

I have something of a love/hate relationship with The Breakfast Club.

I get that for a certain generation of (mostly white) people this film was a seminal coming-of-age movie that really spoke to their high school experience but for me it's a movie with noble intentions that somewhat squanders what's actually interesting about it.

Revisiting it today I still feel the same ambiguity. I appreciate John Hughes and I think a lot of the acting in the movie is quite excellent but I resent that the movie has been positioned as some sort of definitive portrayal of teen life because it just isn't.

It bothers me that there isn't a single person of color in the movie. In fact the closet thing we get to blackness is Anthony Michael Hall affecting a slightly racist stereotypical bluesman voice when donning shades and smoking a joint (he does a similar bit in Weird Science).

And it really bothers me that we're meant to cheer when the most iconoclastic and interesting member of the famous five "types", Ally Sheedy, is remade in Molly Ringwald's more traditionally pretty image. What was that about?

I suppose setting a movie entirely in a library with teens talking, screaming and crying was ambitious enough for 1985, and trying to make the characters more than broad stroke caricatures was a bridge too far. Considering that they're playing "the jock", "the brain", "the princess" et. al., the cast acquits itself very well.

She was cuter before

Judd Nelson is all bravado but he gives you just enough tenderness to find his pretty nasty character interesting. Hall's emotional meltdown also affected me -- maybe since of the five I could probably relate to his character the most, although I loathe to admit it.

Ringwald and Estevez's transformations seem less honest to me although I liked the scene where Ringwald admits she'd avoid the others in the hall the next day. It feels like a conversation I really would of have had in high school.

But what about this movie really resonates besides its killer soundtrack?

The farther I get from my high school experience the hazier it is for me. I always lament the fact that I didn't party enough or study hard enough. I just, like I suspect most people, coasted through it.

So, for the most part, high school movies just don't blow me away. I can't get all nostalgic because for me college was the really formative experience of my life.

I always enjoyed Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Heathers because they were really funny regardless of their setting and the premises felt original. Fast Times at Ridgemont High is full of energy and hormones, which I kind of still am so that movie will always appeal to me. But this one is a little too cute and convenient for me.

I can't for the life of me buy the sudden romances that occur in the last 10 minutes of the movie -- although I guess we're supposed to believe that the heaps of very astute abuse that Nelson hurls at Ringwald's character throughout the movie was actually an elaborate form of foreplay.

And I resent the hell out of the fact that Ringwald asks Hall to write their detention essay and he actually agrees -- especially after she willfully admitted that she would feel "pressured" not to be his friend outside of detention.

Still, it's a great time capsule movie, with one of the best theme songs ever ("Don't You Forget About Me") and I think it's ripe for an update. It's very good at evoking that mood -- that leaden feeling of being stuck in high school. I do remember high school feeling like an eternity, and this movie does a great job of putting you in that mindset.

I just think -- and again to those who adore this movie, my apologies -- that it is ultimately an utterly conventional movie masquerading as an unconventional one.