The Breakfast Club (1985)
“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 and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal.
Does that answer your question?
Sincerely yours,
The Breakfast Club”
Writer-director John Hughes structures his film as a chamber piece: five students at a suburban Chicago high school spend a Saturday together serving detention in the library. Each conveniently represents a familiar teen “type,” which the movie will then spend 100 minutes or so trying to deconstruct. Claire Standish (Molly Ringwald) is the princess prom queen; Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez) is the jock; John Bender (Judd Nelson) is the burnout; Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall) is the nerd; and Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy) is the loner.
Even though the premise sounds a little dry, The Breakfast Club is eminently watchable and consistently entertaining, even when it falters. Perhaps aware that his primary audience would be the 14-to-18 year-old crowd, Hughes added several surreal and silly sequences to interrupt the predominantly serious tone that suffuses the proceedings. These don’t really work, but the shift in tone isn’t sufficiently glaring to disturb the movie’s overall flow.
The characters trapped in detention are all very different individuals. Hughes sets them up as traditional stereotypes, then delights in slowly peeling back the layers, showing how each suffers from surprisingly similar problems. Another traditional Hughes theme can be seen running throughout the entire film: the basic intolerance and stupidity of adults. This is evident in several ways, from the obvious to the subtle. The over-25 crowd rarely fares well in Hughes movies, and this is no exception, but there is a scene in The Breakfast Club which attempts to partially humanize The Authority Figure.
Few will argue that The Breakfast Club is a great film, but it has a candor that is unexpected and refreshing in a sea of too-often generic teen-themed films. The material is a little talky, but it’s hard not to be drawn into the world of these characters. The depiction of high school is evocative because it’s so accurate. Unlike many teen films, which seem to transpire in some kid’s dirty imagination, this picture, despite its occasional flights of fancy, is grounded in reality.
