A troubling movie in the teen genre that only "half" gets it, so I'm only giving it half the stars out if 10.
This lesser known entry in the brat pack oeuvre has early career performances from Winona Ryder, Charlie Sheen, and Jeremy Piven, among others. It tells the story of a sincerely likable dork, who falls in love with a class beauty. While she initially accepts him and shares in his bug collecting hobby over summer vacation, once school resumes in the fall she develops feeling for a football jock instead.
The film is unflinching in showing the anguish of the dorky kid as he comes to realize he just isn't (and never can be) attractive to this girl in the way the jock is. He even discusses this in hard terms as "natural selection." This hard fact is tragic, yet probably true: the film stresses the tragedy of falling in love with an unobtainable object and his having to realize that the fact he can't impress her is something to do with aspects of himself that he cannot and never will change.
About halfway through the film, I could not believe how honestly this difficulty was presented, with the main character considering suicide because he realizes that he doesn't have "what it takes" to be a football jock - physically diminutive and uncoordinated, he can't overcome these things. Even the adults in his world sanction the view of him as an outcast, and his home (in a trailer with an alcoholic father) offers no respite. At the halfway point it seemed like this could be a classic of cinema verité.
However, at this point ideology steps in. Rather than honestly dealing with this situation that could have pushed some kids over the brink to suicide or Columbine-type violence, the film takes a big turn into fantasy and avoids the searing critique it could have been. Via this fantasy, the boy "commits suicide" by instead joining the football team, and even after flubbing the game is awarded a letter jacket by his former jock tormentors (and gets the nerdy girl who was meant for him all along - Winona Ryder in her first screen appearance). Thus, supposedly accepting "his place" as the pet dork of these jocks and settling for a nerdy girlfriend is supposed to make him content. It's hard to believe that the boy, who has been presented as highly intelligent, would be satisfied with such superficial palliatives.
Clearly Hollywood could not face the ideological strife this film prompts at the halfway mark. Instead Hollywood applied the standard "solution" of all teen films: "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." The strategy in all films about teen misfits is to convert the oddball back into something more normative and "acceptable" to dominant ideology - turn the nerd into some form of jock, or at least something acceptable to jocks.
Here, Lucas is defused by making him an "honorary jock" even though he didn't deserve it, as if somehow that gesture wipes away the pain and real difference that he experiences. It's as bad as the old sit-com "Saved By the Bell" in the end, which always performed the same recuperative move to make sure the dorks got reassigned to their "place" in the jock-dominated order by letting them be the jocks' token friends.
This film missed a big opportunity to be a powerful ideological exposé and instead became simply a vehicle for ideology.
This lesser known entry in the brat pack oeuvre has early career performances from Winona Ryder, Charlie Sheen, and Jeremy Piven, among others. It tells the story of a sincerely likable dork, who falls in love with a class beauty. While she initially accepts him and shares in his bug collecting hobby over summer vacation, once school resumes in the fall she develops feeling for a football jock instead.
The film is unflinching in showing the anguish of the dorky kid as he comes to realize he just isn't (and never can be) attractive to this girl in the way the jock is. He even discusses this in hard terms as "natural selection." This hard fact is tragic, yet probably true: the film stresses the tragedy of falling in love with an unobtainable object and his having to realize that the fact he can't impress her is something to do with aspects of himself that he cannot and never will change.
About halfway through the film, I could not believe how honestly this difficulty was presented, with the main character considering suicide because he realizes that he doesn't have "what it takes" to be a football jock - physically diminutive and uncoordinated, he can't overcome these things. Even the adults in his world sanction the view of him as an outcast, and his home (in a trailer with an alcoholic father) offers no respite. At the halfway point it seemed like this could be a classic of cinema verité.
However, at this point ideology steps in. Rather than honestly dealing with this situation that could have pushed some kids over the brink to suicide or Columbine-type violence, the film takes a big turn into fantasy and avoids the searing critique it could have been. Via this fantasy, the boy "commits suicide" by instead joining the football team, and even after flubbing the game is awarded a letter jacket by his former jock tormentors (and gets the nerdy girl who was meant for him all along - Winona Ryder in her first screen appearance). Thus, supposedly accepting "his place" as the pet dork of these jocks and settling for a nerdy girlfriend is supposed to make him content. It's hard to believe that the boy, who has been presented as highly intelligent, would be satisfied with such superficial palliatives.
Clearly Hollywood could not face the ideological strife this film prompts at the halfway mark. Instead Hollywood applied the standard "solution" of all teen films: "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." The strategy in all films about teen misfits is to convert the oddball back into something more normative and "acceptable" to dominant ideology - turn the nerd into some form of jock, or at least something acceptable to jocks.
Here, Lucas is defused by making him an "honorary jock" even though he didn't deserve it, as if somehow that gesture wipes away the pain and real difference that he experiences. It's as bad as the old sit-com "Saved By the Bell" in the end, which always performed the same recuperative move to make sure the dorks got reassigned to their "place" in the jock-dominated order by letting them be the jocks' token friends.
This film missed a big opportunity to be a powerful ideological exposé and instead became simply a vehicle for ideology.