Saturday, April 09, 2005

James Wolcott

“….. A lot of The Breakfast Club is noise and sham and posturing--it even ends with a raised fist. But Hughes' gift for comic interplay is intact, and he works spooky wonders with Ally Sheedy. Sixteen Candles made a national sweetheart out of Molly Ringwald; The Breakfast Club may prove to be Ally Sheedy's valentine….

“…. Ally Sheedy … makes off with the chesse in the mousetrap. In WarGames and Oxford Blues, Sheedy played all-American scrub-faced virtue--she looked as if she could be behind the counter at McDonald's, serving burgers with a smile. Vitamin-enriched in those films, she looks vitamin-deficient here. As Allison, The Breakfast Club's unkempt weirdie, Sheedy wears her bangs long and shaggy, munches on her lower lip, and makes noises like a cornered rodent. She is the school's beatnik-witch nut case, shaking dandruff from her hair like a snowfall and squirreling away so much junk in her purse that someone asks her if she's, like, planning to become a bag lady. Not only is Sheedy's performance wickedly, sympathetically dead-on--she brings to mind every harmless, lonely dark-haired loony who ever haunted a high school corridor--but she seems to have been cracked open as an actress by this role. For long stretches in the movie's early sequences, Allison doesn't speak, but Sheedy's eyes are dartingly alive, with a madwoman-in-the-attic glint. She's like Sissy Spacek in Carrie, so into the character that her gaze becomes spectral.

“So it's a betrayal when Allison gets a Mademoiselle-style make-over from Claire and emerges from the bathroom conventionally pretty--she was far more fetching in her black sweater and bangs…. Yet for all its flaming bull, I enjoyed most of The Breakfast Club… It really is a play, a play in which the message is hooey and the dialogue is strained but th eactors are loose, likable, attuned to each other--comically in sync. In one music-video sequence… Ringwald and Sheedy are paired together on a balcony, and they even dance in character. Ringwald's Claire is open and confident in her movements; Sheedy's Allison is pulled in and mousy. Little ensembe touches like that make up for a lot….”

James Wolcott
Texas Monthly, date?

(but see Wolcott's review of Vagabond, almost a retraction)

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