In Praise of Ferris Bueller and His Perfect Day Off

The 1980s produced a small handful of perfect films. I don’t mean perfectly 80s, not films so hilariously dated that they clearly couldn’t have been made at any other time. I’m not talking about 1984’s Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.

By perfect, I mean the film still effectively does exactly what it’s supposed to do despite the number of years since its original release. A perfect horror movie still creeps you out. A drama still emotionally involves you. And perhaps most difficult of all, a perfect comedy still makes you laugh.

This isn’t a comprehensive list by any means, but some of the perfect films that come to mind from the 1980s are in no particular order: Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Die Hard, Steven Spielberg’s underappreciated ghost love story Always, and, of course, John Hughes’ 1986 masterpiece Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. 

 

This month marks the 30^th anniversary of Ferris Bueller’s theatrical release, and more than a generation after it made its debut, it still does everything it’s supposed to do. Ferris, of course, is played by a young Matthew Broderick at the height of his powers as the ultimate avatar of puckish youth. His character is that guy – the mythical golden boy for whom everything works out. He does what he wants, gets away with everything, and yet is so charming and amiable, you can’t resent him for his good luck. 

The movie takes place over the course of one perfect blue sky day in suburban Chicago when Ferris just can’t bring himself to go to school. It’s too nice outside and too close to the end of the school year. So he decides to skip and have an adventure in the city, despite already having missed so much class that technically, he should have to do summer school to make up for it. His bitter, vengeful principal, Mr. Rooney, becomes determined to catch him in his lies about being too sick to attend, and so the film becomes the dual narrative of Ferris’s adventures in Chicago with his best friend, Cameron, and his girlfriend, Sloan, and Rooney’s efforts to catch them. 

 Hughes knew that contrast is a huge component of humor. Matthew Broderick’s breezy innocence and charm creates a wonderful fizzy friction with the rat-like polyester presence of Jeffrey Jones’s Principal Rooney as well as the sad-sack hypochondria of his friend Cameron. Not to mention what it adds to the most enjoyable conflict of the whole film, Ferris’s battle with his ultra-responsible, schoolmarmish older sister, Jeannie played by Jennifer Grey. I would argue that Jeannie is actually the unsung hero of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. She goes through the greatest transformation and is at the center of some of the funniest, most unexpected moments.

As I said, my definition for perfect is that every element of the movie still functions as intended. Thirty years later, Ferris’s fourth-wall breaking addresses to the audience still feel as off the cuff and conspiratorial as ever. The slow motion shot of the parking lot attendants sailing over a jump to the Star Wars theme song in Cameron’s stolen Ferrari is still epic and glorious. The sequence of Ferris and his friends at the Art Institute of the Chicago remains sweet and surprisingly affecting. Of course, the “Twist and Shout” parade sequence is a fantastic combination of image, sound, and editing that builds to to the point of practically being an ecstatic, religious experience. Still.  And Ferris’s race home through backyards and living rooms in an effort to not get caught is still an expertly shot and edited bit of filmmaking.

Yes, each individual component of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off still works, but the film is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a bright, light-on-its-feet hymn to youth and not letting the weight of the world stop you from adventure. It is, in short, perfect. 

Mustang

When the summer is awash in big budget special effects laden blockbusters, it’s occasionally a good thing to cleanse your cinematic palate with something more subtle and more challenging, something more about the human heart and less about explosions. To this end, I recommend the 2015 Turkish/French film, Mustang. 

 It’s the feature film debut of director Deniz Gamze Erguven, and it tells the story of five sisters living in a rural village in contemporary Turkey. The sisters ranging in age from 17 to 12 are orphans and live with their grandmother and uncle in a big house outside of town. The film opens on the last day of school before summer. After saying goodbye to their teachers, they walk home with some boys and go by way of the beach. While there, they stop and horse around for a while. Among other things, they play chicken, getting on the shoulders of the boys and jousting, seeing who can push who into the water. To western eyes, it looks like sweet, innocent fun. The problems begin when the girls arrive home and Grandma goes ballistic. A busybody from town called her to say that her granddaughters were behaving in a positively immoral and shameful way – getting on the shoulders of boys, getting their school uniforms wet for everyone to see, etc. As mad as Grandma is, their uncle’s anger is worse. He forbids them from leaving the house and begins installing gates and walls around the property to keep the girls inside and under control. He tells them that they won’t be going back to school and instead will just learn how to be proper young women by taking cooking and sewing lessons from some of their female relatives. 

 

The five sisters hate the increased repression and find ways around it. One sister crawls down the drain pipe on the side of the house to meet her lover in the woods. Two of them sunbathe in bikinis, resting their feet against the very bars that keep them captive. The youngest sister, Lale, who is the protagonist of the film, arranges for all the sisters to sneak out to attend a big soccer match in a neighboring town. With each incident, the uncle responds with more locks and bars and higher gates.

What at first just seems extreme and unnecessary soon becomes nightmarish when it becomes apparent that the girls’ uncle is systematically abusing them at night. First the older ones and then the younger ones. The grandma knows what’s happening but also knows that, as a woman, she has almost no power – cultural or legal – to put a stop to it. So instead, she tries to create the one exit for her granddaughters that she can – marriage. The older two get married off quickly – one happily, not very much not – but the other three sisters are trapped. I won’t give away how the film ends except to say that the sisters do not give up. 

 Without being didactic or preachy, the film addresses the question of the female body, who owns it, who is responsible for it. With almost documentary-like presentation, the film shows some of the difficulty and horror of being a woman in a world so often dominated by men who call the shots. The film creates great empathy for the helplessness and yet the profound strength of these women and girls in excruciating circumstances.

The five sisters together are a force of nature. Beautiful, defiant, smart, and irreverent, they make you wish they were your daughters. The sequences of them joking around, comforting each other, and even just being together as they silently lie on the floor of their room in a patch of sunlight with nowhere to go and nothing to do – they are all organic and completely believable. Throughout the film, their long, dark hair is obviously meant to suggest the manes of the wild horses of the title of the film, the mustang, a creature known both for its strength and endurance and also its unwillingness to be tamed. Despite tragedy, repression, abuse, and neglect, the sisters in Mustang refuse to be corralled into the unfair and hurtful expectations of the world they were born into.

If you are craving a film this summer that gives you something to feel and to think about instead of just lame spectacle, check out Mustang.  

Trumbo

Actor Bryan Cranston has had a fascinating career. Like many working actors, he got his start in TV, but he’s shown an uncanny knack for being part of influential projects. In the 90s, he had a memorable recurring role on Seinfeld, one of the most impactful tv comedies ever. He played Tim Watley, the swinging dentist. In the early 2000s, he was nominated for Emmys and Golden Globes awards pretty regularly for his role as Hal, the loving, unpredictable father on Malcolm in the Middle. Starting in 2008, Cranston switched gears entirely and played the high school chemistry teacher turned murderous drug kingpin Walter White on Breaking Bad, a show that many critics hailed as one of the best television dramas of all time. 

 Cranston has worked in film as well, often picking up small character roles, sometimes in big budget Hollywood pictures like John Carter and sometimes in small boutique independent films like Drive. In 2015, he finally got a lead role in a high profile film called Trumbo. In it, Cranston plays the title character, Dalton Trumbo, a real life Hollywood screenwriter who was a card carrying member of the Communist party. He was blacklisted by the film industry and served time in prison for refusing to testify and name names for the House Un American Activities Committee. During his time on the blacklist, when the film industry publicly insisted that no one hire him to do any work, Trumbo continued to work. Using pseudonyms, he wrote screenplays for trashy B movies just to keep food on the table. But he also wrote prestige projects and either used a fellow writer as a front or used a fake name entirely. Most famously, Trumbo wrote the Oscar winning screenplays for both 1952’s Roman Holiday and 1956’s The Brave One. Imagine the frustration of Hollywood’s mainstream elite when they figured out that they gave their highest, most coveted award to someone they publicly exiled and repudiated?

 

So Trumbo is an underdog story about a man persecuted for his political leanings and his unwillingness to join in the persecution of others. And Cranston does a great job. Trumbo isn’t a well-known figure, so it’s hard to say if his portrayal is a complete embodiment. But it’s definitely a very good performance. His Trumbo is smart, prickly, and principled. At times, he’s maddeningly self-absorbed, but Cranston never plays him as the woe-is-me tortured artist monster. He plays him as a husband and dad who wants to provide for his family and is trying to do it as a multi-million dollar industry actively works to stop him. Cranston plays Trumbo with complexity and great compassion. He brings a vitality to what might otherwise just be a standard bio pic character.

There are problems with the film – Diane Lane pretty much goes to waste as Trumbo’s fierce wife, Cleo. The structure of the film is pretty predicable, checking off the boxes of most based-on-real-life overcoming adversity stories.

 But the naturalistic recreations of behind-the-scenes Hollywood when it was at its height are great, and the actors portraying John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, and Hedda Hopper are top notch. In some ways, Trumbo is what the Coen Brothers’ Hail Ceasar should have been. 

The heart of the film is Bryan Cranston though and his nervy, nuanced portrayal of a man who stood up for his beliefs when he had everything to lose, a man who used talent, hard work, and love to endure and eventually triumph over small mindedness and persecution.