'The Breakfast Club' Was More Than Just a Comedy

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Brian (Anthony Michael Hall): Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us — in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain ...

Andrew (Emilio Estevez): ... and an athlete ...

Allison (Ally Sheedy): ... and a basket case ...

Claire (Molly Ringwald): ... a princess ...

John (Judd Nelson): ... and a criminal ...

Brian: Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.

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"The Breakfast Club," which began playing on America's movie screens 30 years ago today, was better than most of the coming–of–age flicks I have seen — and more than just a comedy.

So often, "coming of age" seems to be code for "losing one's virginity" — or trying to lose one's virginity and failing miserably. Excuses for exploiting the young and the beautiful. (That seemed to be especially true of movies of the mid–1980s.)

That really does seem unfortunate to me because there are so many other aspects of the maturation process that do not involve sex — but do involve a voyage of self–discovery. And, to be fair, there have been some movies that have tried to tackle the topic of coming of age from a more cerebral perspective. Some succeeded. Some did not.

"The Breakfast Club" was one of the better ones.

The premise was that five students, each occupying a different rung on the ladder of high school popularity, were brought together to serve a day of detention on a Saturday. They didn't know each other when the day began, but they knew each other pretty well when the day was over.

This was an old tactic, critic Roger Ebert observed, given a new spin. "William Saroyan and Eugene O'Neill have been here before, but they used saloons and drunks. 'The Breakfast Club' uses a high school library and five teenage kids."

OK, it wasn't an original tactic. But the folks who put the movie together managed to attract an audience by casting five of the hottest young stars around at that time — Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy.

Once they had 'em in the theater, they could tell their story.

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With nearly all of the action taking place in that high school library, the dialogue became the most important part of the movie. "The Breakfast Club" was like a high school version of the United Nations, with each campus clique represented. Thirty years later, the labels are probably different — language, after all, defines each generation — but the types are universal.

Anyone who ever spent any time in high school is familiar with them. The athlete, the brain, the criminal, the prom queen, the misfit. The cast of "The Breakfast Club" seemed to accept the spots in the high school pecking order to which they had been assigned by life; when the movie began, the characters knew little about each other — and really did not want to know much about each other.

An hour and a half later (by moviegoer's time) they knew all about each other. They had bonded, each in his or her own way but learning in the process the things that they had in common.

The two girls bonded in ways their peers never would have been able to comprehend. The prom queen (Molly Ringwald) was applying makeup to the face of the misfit (Ally Sheedy).

"Why are you being so nice to me?" she asked with the wary suspicion of one who has been humiliated before.

"Because you're letting me," the prom queen replied, and one suspected that, in her experience, things like trust frequently came with strings attached. At the same time, the audience knew that Sheedy didn't trust people easily, that it was a pretty big deal for her to allow Ringwald to be that close.

But girls' agendas are always more complicated than boys'. For the boys in "The Breakfast Club," it was about making the grade. One was driven to get grades that were good enough to merit a full academic scholarship. Another was driven to get grades that were good enough that, combined with athletic skill, would merit an athletic scholarship. The third was driven, simply, to get grades that were good enough to get by.

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And, while there has always been and always will be a certain amount of macho posturing in male relationships, the boys managed to get past that on several occasions.

I don't think I ever expected that any of them would win acting awards, but I hoped that the movie might receive some recognition from Oscar. But it did not. That was in keeping, I suppose, with the Academy Awards' general — and long–standing — bias against comedies.

But there were many dramatic moments and dramatic lines in "The Breakfast Club." To dismiss it as a comedy is to do it a disservice.

'Bobby' Tried to Do Too Much

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I've known for a long time that Martin Sheen is a talented guy.

And he has fathered a bunch of talented children.

So it really is unfortunate that perhaps the least talented of the group, his son Charlie, has been the one who has been getting most of the attention lately.

It wasn't that way five years ago.

On this day in 2006, Charlie's older brother, Emilio Estevez, was the center of attention. He had written and directed a movie about the day that Robert Kennedy was assassinated called "Bobby." You can believe me when I say it was an ambitious undertaking.

Even though it was about a real event, it was a fictional story with an ensemble cast — not unlike the style one often sees in the works of Robert Altman, although Altman doesn't typically use actual events as the backdrops for his movies — and there were times, frankly, when I felt the story was a bit bogged down by all the characters and subplots that viewers had to follow.

Perhaps it should have been more like "Shampoo," a successful movie from the mid–1970s that used the contentious 1968 presidential election as its backdrop — fewer characters with, consequently, fewer plot lines.

It also reminded me, in some ways, of Oliver Stone's "JFK," which made its debut 15 years earlier. I had that sensation early in the movie.

If you've seen "JFK," you know that it opens with period film footage of President Kennedy while President Eisenhower's famous warning about the "military–industrial complex" was played in the background. In "Bobby," archival footage was seen while recordings of Robert Kennedy giving speeches — his announcement of his candidacy for president, his speech the night Martin Luther King was assassinated — played in the background, and I couldn't help wondering if Stone's film had inspired "Bobby," to any extent.

Perhaps Estevez was inspired by both Stone and Altman.

And maybe the Altman approach was necessary, given the many conflicts in American society at that time. But I felt that "Bobby" became top–heavy with all the individual story lines — not, it can be plausibly argued, unlike life.

On the morning of September 11, for example, everyone was busy with his or her own life — until airplanes were hijacked and crashed into buildings. Then people stopped what they were doing, and everyone's attention was riveted to the same thing.

It is the same with any other big event in modern times. The technological advances of the 20th century have that power over us — to force us to re–focus on a dime. The things we were doing or that demanded our immediate attention didn't go away. They just got put on the shelf.

It was an admirable effort, though, and it was one in which Estevez was able to enlist the assistance of his distinguished father (who played a campaign donor married to Helen Hunt). The cast also included Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Fishburne, Harry Belafonte, Christian Slater, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore and others.

My advice would have been to pare it down a little. One or two of the subplots could have been discarded, allowing the film to focus more on the unifying event. Besides, the film already had plenty of star power.

Father and son share a high regard for Robert F. Kennedy — even though Estevez, like me, was only a child when Kennedy was killed. He may have relied, to an extent, on his memories of that time, but he was barely 6 when Kennedy was assassinated so his memories can't be that great. My guess is that most of what he knows of that time is actually what he has been told by others.

But be that as it may ...

In spite of its drawbacks, "Bobby" told a tale of a time that young Americans have never known and many older Americans seem to have forgotten. And perhaps, as I say, so many characters were needed to provide a vivid portrait of that time in American history.

It effectively re–created a period when events seemed to be spiraling out of control. With an increasingly unpopular war dominating the headlines and a new generation of leaders being gunned down on what appeared to be a regular basis, there was an unmistakable sense that no one was in charge.

(The closest example I can think of in modern times was the waning months of the George W. Bush administration.)

"Bobby" did tend, as I say, to get bogged down by the many subplots — which I concluded, even before I had completed my first viewing of the movie, were designed to illustrate the many levels on which the great divide existed.

There was a racial divide, as illustrated by the apparently racist attitude of the kitchen manager (Christian Slater) who wouldn't permit his minority employees to take time off to vote.

There was a gender divide. Sometimes it was shown in heroic and self–sacrificing stories, such as the one in which a young girl (Lindsay Lohan) was marrying a friend (Elijah Wood) to keep him from going to Vietnam. Reportedly, that was based on a true story — Estevez said a woman told him, while he was writing the movie, that she actually married two friends for that purpose.

Other times, it was much more self–serving, even surprisingly so. At points, it gave the appearance of a soap opera.

The hotel manager (William H. Macy) was cheating on his aging but still attractive wife (Sharon Stone) with a young hotel switchboard operator (Heather Graham). Sheen's middle–aged campaign donor and his much younger wife struggled to overcome the issues in their marriage. Estevez himself played the part of the husband/manager of a boozy lounge singer (Demi Moore) intent on launching a comeback of sorts in Las Vegas.

There was the alienation of the young — the "never trust anyone over 30" crowd — who sought answers to problems from their contemporaries rather than older authority figures. In the 1960s, such answers were often said to be found through drug use, and two campaign workers (Brian Geraghty and Shia LaBeouf) were seen experimenting with acid with the help of a drug dealer (Ashton Kutcher).

They were all going about their lives — until the climactic moment when Kennedy was shot — and the audience could see all the characters gathered in one place, some of whom were injured, others were tending to their wounds, overcoming their differences — not unlike the many stories that were told of the heroic deeds that took place in the Twin Towers or the Pentagon or aboard Flight 93.

Above it all could be heard the inspirational words spoken by Bobby Kennedy after Martin Luther King's murder — made all the more poignant by the realization that Kennedy himself would die a violent death only two months later.

It was clear that Estevez had a passion for his subject. Perhaps he learned from "Bobby" that it's true what they say.

Less is more.