Then, with no warning, he starts to pound the passenger seat. He shakes his head and yanks the key out of the ignition. He squinches up his eyes and growls, “He’ll keep calling and calling and calling. . .” He puts the key in the ignition, starts the car. Twenty bucks says he’s sitting in his car debating about whether he should go out or not.”Ĭut to Cameron, at the wheel of a white junker, his long, rubbery face cast in a morbid posture. Then he turns to the camera and, with a look of indignation, says: “I’m so disappointed in Cameron. Dad calls from work and Ferris plays him like a Stradivarius. Ferris dances around the house (accompanied by the theme from I Dream of Jeannie). It is the tension between these two that drives the action. Cameron is an actual teenager: alienated from his parents, painfully insecure, angry, depressed. He is what every teenage guy dreams of being: a raging, narcissistic id who gets away with it. He has internalized the unconditional love of his parents and skips through his days in a self-assured reverie. But he does something far more compelling: he renders the pair as a psychological dyad. Hughes could have simply cast him as a straight man for Ferris. It has no business, really, in what has been-to this point-smarter-than-average teenybopper fare. The invocation of the old spiritual is at once strange and revelatory. And then, fabulously, he begins to sing.Ī rich, somber chorus of voices joins him. His expression is one of resignation, giving unto despair. You just can’t think of anything good to do.” The phone rings again and Ferris mutters, “You’re not dying. Meaning, essentially, chauffeur him around.Ĭameron declines in a froggy voice. It is Ferris demanding that Cameron come over and spend the day with him. The phone by the bed rings and a hand appears and slowly clicks on the speakerphone. This is our introduction to Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck), Ferris’s best friend. A figure lies obscured under a blanket, like a mummy, while an electronic dirge plays in the background. We cut to a dark, sarcophagus-like bedroom, littered with medicine bottles and crumpled Kleenex. The scene shifts to a sleek, modern home, propped up on stilts and perched at the edge of a bluff. We get a few scenes of him mugging for the camera, and the introduction of his inept nemesis, the dean of students, Ed Rooney. It is a pathetically stagy performance and he seems mildly disappointed when his doting parents fall for it. We initially encounter him playing sick on his bed. Hughes is, like any decent Aristotelian, more concerned with character.įerris himself (Matthew Broderick, unbearably young) comes across as a charming manipulator utterly devoted to his own enjoyments. I needn’t labor the basic plot-kid fakes being sick, outwits dopey grownups, gallivants around Chicago with pals. He snuck genuine art past the multiplex censors. He lured viewers into embracing his film as an escapist farce, then hit them with a pitch-perfect exploration of teen angst. More than this, though, Hughes performed an astounding ontological feat. It featured a number of techniques that I recognized from other, later films: direct addresses to the camera, on-screen graphics, the prominent use of background songs to create de facto music videos, the sudden exhilarating blur of fantasy and reality. I wasn’t entirely sure it qualified as a teen movie at all. It was, without a doubt, the most sophisticated teen movie I had ever seen. I watched the film in a state of growing astonishment. He had about forty movies, most of which were thrillers of the sort that feature a European secret agent babe who takes her shirt off and a picturesque decapitation. Notwithstanding this, last winter I got sick, so sick I was reduced to raiding my landlord’s DVD collection. More often than not, I am really just a very big asshole. And, as generally happens when I miss out on all the hubbub, I took it personally and thus bore a senseless grudge against the film, which I would routinely malign whenever people tried to explain how terrific it was. I missed Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on the first pass, so I never quite understood what all the hubbub was about.
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