Screws fall out all the time, the world’s an imperfect place.
I was a teenager when The Breakfast Club came out. Back then I remember thinking the film should be placed in a time capsule so twenty years later I could show kids what school was like in my day. Here we are, 40 years later and while I have no kids The Breakfast Club isn’t as perfect a time piece as I thought. It’s my generation filtered through a decade when movies were kind of weak. By that I mean a lot of the film now doesn’t feel honest. This isn’t quite how I remember it.
The film is a stereotyped, potty-mouthed therapy session and I know I’m getting old when I’m starting to sympathize with the unfair way it looks at parents. Everybody comes from a broken home where there’s either too much pressure put on them to win and succeed or they’re left completely alone. Nobody’s family exists in a middle ground. None of them are interested in listening to their kids. I always knew Vernon was a cartoonish figure, and I still find a lot of his interactions to be funny, but I much more enjoyed Carl the janitor. (“I am the eyes and ears of this institution.”)
Filmmaker John Hughes blew into Hollywood, dominated it like a one-man MCU and then disappeared. This is like a filmed play, which asks a lot of a director. (Although The Breakfast Club was filmed at Maine North High School in Des Plaines, Illinois, the school’s library was deemed too small so most of the movie was shot on a library set constructed inside the gymnasium.) The focus is on writing and performance, but you want to be cinematic. I’m drawn to good dialogue and I still find his script to be witty, perceptive and mostly realistic when dealing with the five kids. There’s an affection for the kids, and the writing respects them in the way their parents do not. The cast is still great. There’s an electricity between them, like an all-star cast.
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