Back to the 80s Month: The Breakfast Club (Dir John Hughes, 1h 37m, 1985)

 Perhaps no director better encapsulates the archetypal 80s teen movie, in all its coming-of-age, meet-cute warts-and-all messiness than John Hughes. Across his career, from early efforts Sixteen Candles to off-beat Weird Science, to his later focus upon high-school set comedies and dramas, including Ferris Bueller and Pretty in Pink Hughes' films captured, as few of his contempories and fewer of his successors managed, the feel and sense of being a teenager, and navigating the world of high-school cliques, geeks, and jocks, in the 80s and beyond.

No film captures this better than The Breakfast Club, a surprisingly intimate portrait of five radically different teenagers, from Emilio Estavez's jock wrestler to Ally Sheedy's disaffected goth, brought together via a shared detention one Saturday morning, and whose clashing  personalities and fractious relationships with their parents and authority in general, as well as each other, is unravelled over the day.

It is these five characters, and the positively sadistic figure of the Vice Principal Vernon (played to perfection by the late Paul Gleeson), that the film rests upon; the five cliques of beauty queen, jockish wrestler, nerd, troubled down-and-out, and quiet oddball not only butting heads with each other, but, particularly in the case of Judd Nelson's John Bender (perhaps the film's single most memorable character), with the authority represented by Vernon. The first half of the film, up until the quintet venture out of their confinement in the school library, in search of Bender's drug stash, is practically a chamber piece, with Bender's confrontational, crass and anti-authoritarian persona ruffling feathers with his other classmates, who regard him either as a threat or a loser.

This is, without a doubt, where the film is strongest, where Hughes' and perception of the teenage struggle is best shown, of the sense of fitting in to one of the various cliques on pain of social isolation, even if that clique is looked, particularly in the case of nerdish Brian (Anthony Michael Hall) down upon by the more popular or athletic kids. It is also where his ear for the lingo, for the speech patterns of each character is shown best; the opening twenty minutes in which Vernon hangs, vulture-ish around the corner, just out of shot, and each character begins to unspool, to shed a little light upon themselves, is a masterclass of economic dialogue and character building.

Together with the introduction of each character, from spoiled daddy's girl, Claire, in her father's BMW, to Brian's overbearing mother, to Bender's appearance on foot, we are given a shorthand of who these characters are, and long before these issues come to the fore in the film's confessional second half, we get a glimpse-or in Bender's case, a lack of a glimpse- of their relationships with their parents. In two minutes, we are introduced to our protagonists, their reason d'etre, and the clique that they belong to-it's nothing short of impressive, and gives each character a weight even before they enter detention.

And for the first half, the characters essentially bounce against each other-Bender is deliberately confrontational, his anti-authoritarian approach rubbing up against the rest of the group badly, at one point ending up in a scuffle with Estevez's Andrew, whilst making highly inappropriate come-ons to Claire or picking on Brian. The relationship between Brian and the more popular kids is equally fractious, whilst Allison, often physically distanced in shot, is apart from the group, barely talking through the first half of the film, aside from strange squeaks-more than any other character in the film, Allison's costume, her long hair that covers her face that conveys her personality, her abstraction from the group.

 However, it is with the second half of the film, once the group have ventured out of the confines of the library-which, to Hughes' credit, is one of the great settings of  teen cinema-that the film begins to unravel. Badly. Following an enjoyably silly moment in which our quintet sneak around the school avoiding Vernon, up till Bender is caught, consigned to a cupboard, and promptly escapes, to reunite with the rest of the group. Here, the film begins to go downhill, and here, Hughes' grip on the teenage condition begins to feel, frankly, dated, and this, in all honesty, in modern eyes, particularly in terms of the interaction between Bender and Claire, is creepy, overly sexualised and as the group start to open up to each other, becomes more pronounced.

Thus, as the quintet begins to divulge more information to each other, to, in a sense, become friends-though the film's ending seems to make a one-eighty turn on the entire concept of these five being friends come the school week-so the film engages in more hijinks, with Bender sharing his weed with the rest of the group as they proceed to get stoned, cause more chaos, including trashing part of the ceiling as Bender falls through it, dance around to music, where the film's 80s synth rock soundtrack rears its head more notably, and generally sit around to discuss their miscellaneous fractious relationships with their parents.

And whilst these scenes do give the film a denoument, as our heroes eventually seem to come to terms with their parents, and their roles in school, there's something hollow and frustrating about it. Allison, largely consigned to idiosyncracies and lying, only becomes desirable by Andrew once she is made over, once she conforms to the Beauty Queen clique's idea of beauty, rather than as someone with a persona and an identity of her own. For all the soul-searching transformation of the second half of the film, it arrives back exactly where it was-the Breakfast Club, as they dub themselves, start, and indeed finish the film as "a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. They do not evolve, past coming to terms with the lots their parents, school and society in general give them.

Perhaps I belong to the wrong generation, but for me, The Breakfast Club seems outdated in almost every sense, from its now-questionable sexual politics to its hastily tacked on ending in which four of our heroes end up together, to its venacular, its feel, and its dated sensibilties. Hughes absolutely, as can be seen in the rest of his films, knew how to speak to the teenagers of the mid 1980s, but, thirty-five years, and two generations hence, The Breakfast Club feels strangely hackneyed, his style of writing long since sub-submed into cinema and television as far apart as Joss Wheedon's Buffy and the comedies of Judd Apatow. It feels like a glimpse of decades prior, for better or worse.

But for me, The Breakfast Club is a strange disappointment. It is a film that carries such weight, such cultural baggage from the halycon 80s that it was destined either to hit straight on or disappoint tremendously, and sadly, for me, this film is the latter, a by-numbers depiction of school life that starts and finishes with the status-quo, has no idea what to do with the geek and the loner, and spends far too long on its central duo's will-they-won't-they despite its creepy overtones. It is dated, tiresome, and oddly underwhelming.

Rating: Neutral