Showing @ Vue – Omni Centre, Edinburgh, Wed 10 Jun only
John Hughes / USA / 1986 / 103 min
Some films capture such specific moments in time that they seem to distil that entire era. Such titles include Blow-Up, Antonioni’s panegyric to swinging-sixties London, and Pulp Fiction, Tarantino’s ultra-violent, ultra-cool celebration of 90s post-modernity. Another of these celluloid time-capsules, which this week completed the Back in Vue season, is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; a celebration of mid-eighties Reaganism.
Ferris (played by a fresh-faced, cock-sure Matthew Broderick) decides he wants a break from the pointless idiocy of high school. After feigning sickness (leaving his sister entirely unconvinced) he then persuades his genuinely under-the-weather best friend, Cameron (Alan Ruck) to join him. Having managed to sneak his girlfriend (Mia Sara) out of class, the teen-troika embark on a day of youthful hedonism – that is unless Dean of Students, Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) catches them in the act.
One of the most striking things about the film is its eponymous protagonist, Ferris Bueller. Despite being played superbly by Broderick, Bueller is one of the singularly most unlikeable heroes ever invented, embodying the smug complacency one normally hopes is just a cruel stereotype of an American. He revels in his ignorance of the outside world and personifies the ruthless individualism Reaganomics. He constantly goads his best friend (who is the only sympathetic character in the movie) to enjoy himself; to invest in the immediate gratification of consumerism and all things American. The conservative Republican agenda can be perceived in its promotion of the nuclear family (note the differences between Ferris and Cameron’s upbringing) and patriarchy (note the way Rooney addresses Mrs Bueller compared with the supposed Mr Peterson). Ben Stein, who plays the droning Economics teacher, once called the film the Gone with the Wind of comedies and if we’re talking about racial representations, that’s certainly true. For better or worse, this really is the all-American movie of the 80s. With a great soundtrack and a stunningly prescient cameo by Charlie Sheen, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is brilliantly cinematic, implausibly fun, and horribly neoliberal.