This film was very important to me when I was a teenager. It's really the whole reason I decided to do this Eighties retrospective; not that I wasn't curious about the other films, but I absolutely adored this. It would easily have been my favorite of the bunch if you'd asked me back then, and if I hadn't started thinking about this one I probably wouldn't have bothered with the others.
This was Barry Levinson's first movie. He both wrote and directed it, and for a first film it's remarkably assured. The story is disjointed (in fact, it could be argued that the film doesn't have a story), but Levinson never gets lost, never gets bogged down, and he gets great performances from an inexperienced cast. I remember being young and watching this when it was still new and being blown away by it; it was just so smart, and so funny and serious at the same time, and I don't think I had ever really seen that done before. I wanted to be as cool as Mickey Rourke, and as clever and unpredictable as Kevin Bacon, and as thoughtful and big-hearted as Tim Daly. I really looked up to those guys.
It's amazing how much my perspective has changed since I was a teenager. The movie is about six guys wrestling with growing up, resisting to varying degrees the pull of maturity. Shrevie (Daniel Stern) is finding that marriage isn't everything he hoped it would be (and so is his wife Beth, played by Ellen Barkin). Meanwhile Eddie (Steve Guttenberg) is having cold feet about his own pending marriage to Elyse (Sharon Ziman, Levinson's sister, who never appears onscreen), and talking with Shrevie about it is not helping either of them. Fenwick (Bacon) is set up as the brains of the bunch, but he's aimless and falling into alcoholism. Boogie (Rourke) is also aimless, but his problem is gambling debts. Billy (Daly) is the most sympathetic of the group, pursuing his master's degree and a female friend, impregnated by him, who refuses his offer of marriage. And then there's Modell (Paul Reiser), who doesn't really have any problems; he's just there to be funny.
When I was 15, they were more mature than me, and it was interesting to watch their struggles, and to imagine myself facing these same difficulties in a few short years. Now I'm in my forties, and it's amazing to me how immature they seem. They're very well-drawn characters, but I found myself incredibly frustrated with almost all of them, in large part because of how they treat the women in their lives. Eddie is clearly just a dickhead, and his fiancée should run screaming. And the scene where Shrevie confides to Eddie that he and Beth can't even have a five-minute conversation seems unutterably sad to me. I hope Beth and Shrevie will work out their problems, but to be honest, if I was her I'd rather be with Boogie, even if he comes very close to doing something unforgivable. It seems like at least they'd have things to talk about.
Boogie himself has moments where he is, as my friend Mills calls him, "the blueprint for cool." For the most part he seems much more mature than his friends, much wiser and more in control, and yet he keeps doing things that aggravate me. The whole “dick in the popcorn” thing is just too ridiculous for words. I had completely forgotten that scene. And the thing with Beth and his bet with the guys...well, like I said, he came really close to going too far there. I understand how desperate he was, but if he'd gone through with that plan I would have had to hate him, and the fact that he even thought of it was pretty awful. Still, he's so likeable otherwise; it's easy to forget, now that he's become an alien space lizard, how charming Rourke was as a young actor. Beth forgives him, so I forgive him, but man, there are things about him that make me pretty uncomfortable. If I have a problem with the script, it's the inconsistency of Boogie's character as written. He seems to be the best of the lot, and yet...well, I suppose we're all a little bit duplicitous, aren't we? I do have to say that his salvation at the end of the film is a little too...providential. His debts are paid and he's offered a good job? It feels like Levinson trying not to have an unhappy ending.
Billy is the only one I really feel good about. His relationship with Barbara (Kathryn Dowling) is the only one that feels...well, modern, which might not be fair, since the film is set in 1959. I mean, of course the other guys are dicks to women. In 1959, that's what women were for. But Billy actually treats Barbara with respect. He doesn't want to take her away from her job, which she enjoys and is good at. And although he might have just been saying it because he felt obligated, I think he actually loves Barbara, that he wanted to marry her even before she got pregnant. Daly plays that very straight, and I believe him. Barbara says that he's confusing a friendship with a woman on one hand, and love on the other, but I say 1) I'm not sure she's right, and 2) that she's missed an important point: a strong marriage should be a friendship. If they enjoy each other's company (as they must, since they've been friends for years, close enough that she came to New York to visit him) and are sexually attracted to each other (which, since they're about to become parents, seems to be the case), then that's as good a recipe for a strong marriage as you're likely to find, far better than mindless passion or just thinking, as Eddie does about Elyse, that “it just seemed like it was time.” I think Billy and Barbara have a much better shot at happiness together than Beth and Shrevie have, as well.
Still, although the romantic in me is pulling for Billy, it's the one note in this movie that stands out: Barbara isn't willing to rush into a marriage because she's found herself "in trouble," to use the vernacular of my mother's generation. She's competent, intelligent, and self-sufficient. Maybe she'll marry Billy, and maybe she won't, but it'll be her decision. Nothing will force her one way or the other, and whatever she decides, she'll handle the consequences. She makes every guy in the film, including Billy, look like a child.
Fenwick is the one I identify with. In fact, he's quite a bit like I was as a very young man; aimless, self-destructive, difficult to be around, but still fun, still charming, so folks are reluctant to abandon him. Of course, he has a trust fund, whereas I was sleeping in the park, but still, his character feels familiar to me. I think that in his forties, once the trust fund ran out, he probably found himself in a situation very much like my own. I hope that, like me, he made peace with who he was.
I never married, and I have no children. I'm 42 now, so that's unlikely to change. It could be argued that Shrevie and Eddie are at least taking the plunge, and I just dodged the responsibility. But I would say in reply that they decided to marry for the wrong reasons, and that in fact not marrying would have been the more responsible decision in both cases. Of course, I say that not having lived in 1959. It was a different world, one I don't really understand, and pressures might well have been higher on them than they were on me in the eighties and early nineties, when I was their age. But their attitudes are difficult to defend when you consider how much more enlightened Billy's outlook is. Even in the fifties it was possible to not treat women like useful but disposable objects. Eddie's marriage looks doomed to me, and Shrevie has a long hard road ahead to save his (though I submit that Ellen Barkin appears to be worth the effort). They just all, except Billy, seem so childish to me now.
I like talky movies. I'm perfectly happy to sit and watch people have interesting conversations for an hour and a half. I did notice that some of the conversations in this film don't feel anywhere near as clever now as they did thirty years ago, like when Reiser is saying that he's uncomfortable with the word “nuance.” A lot of it seems to have been just stream-of-consciousness writing by Levinson, or possibly ad-libbing, particularly as far as Reiser is concerned. He was not an actor at this time, but rather a stand-up comic, so Levinson may have just let him go in some scenes. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Those moments are pretty few, though, and on the whole it's a wonderful script, full of good lines and real-sounding conversations.
This is almost more a series of loosely-related vignettes than a film, and structurally I think it's pretty solid. The film was pioneering in that regard, and it was influential, but in places it just doesn't feel well-thought-out. For example, does the bit where Boogie stops to chat up the woman on the horse add anything to the film? Not obviously. But there are many more moments where it works. Not a single one of the scenes that focus on Kevin Bacon are important to the overall story, they don't affect the lives of any of the other characters (except for getting them briefly arrested), but put together they paint a very clear picture of his character, and his character adds a lot to the feeling of the film. With a very few exceptions it's a remarkably well-written screenplay, and you can see its influence in everyone from Hal Hartley to Quentin Tarantino. The “Cinema of Cool” may have blossomed in the late eighties and early nineties, but it took root right here. You gotta give Levinson and Diner propers for that.
DOES IT HOLD UP? I'm afraid not, at least not 100%. I respect Barry Levinson a great deal, and this is a fine film within its context, but it just isn't what it used to be. Like with The Elephant Man, it's a very good film, but it isn't timeless; other films since have followed its blueprint and done it better. Still, you know what I'd love? A reunion of some kind. Maybe a sequel set in 1989, thirty years later (they're all thirty years older now in real life), or maybe a whole new story. It would be fun, given what I consider to be the...
BEST THING ABOUT THE FILM: Well, like I said, some of the dialog is very good, but what really stands out is the cast. The six friends, plus Barkin and Dowling, are not quite perfect, but they're everything you could reasonably ask. Even though I dislike many of the characters, it's hard to find fault with the way they were played. Of course all of them (except Dowling) went on to have solid careers, so looking back today it isn't surprising that they did a good job, but in 1982 audiences must have been blown away by all these talented newcomers. Rourke had done some interesting work, but certainly wasn't a household name. Bacon had been only a minor player in Animal House (and had made the much-maligned Friday the 13th) and none of the others had really done anything at all. This movie, to some extent, made them stars, and it's great to see them together, right at the beginning.
WORST THING ABOUT THE FILM: I can't identify with the characters anymore, and it bothers me a little that I once could. Christ, was I that big a dickhead?
SCORE: 7/10.
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