Monday, Jul. 21, 2008

HOOKY PUCK FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF Directed and Written by John Hughes

By Richard Schickel

Scenes of exquisite boredom at school, as the teachers drone on about such traditional crowd pleasers as the Smoot-Hawley tariff act. Scenes of exquisite calculation at home, as Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) fakes an illness that will spare his fine intelligence another assault by the proponents of useless information. Ferris is no ordinary truant. The point of his exercise is not to waste the day but to spend it wisely. Or wise-guyly. So he will spring his best girl (Mia Sara) from school. He will get his best friend (Alan Ruck, who is lovely as a boy struggling for security) to abscond with the family Ferrari so they can tool about in style. They will talk their way into a chic restaurant, enliven an ethnic parade and, at every point, avoid the forces of propriety. Chief among these are Ferris' sister (Jennifer Grey), who just hates the way he gets away with everything, and the dean of students (Jeffrey Jones), who distills all the pettiness of spirit and smallness of mind in a teen's view of adult authority. Jones provides John Hughes with the comic mainspring he needs to launch himself successfully in a new direction. In The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, Hughes portrayed adolescent angst in a fairly realistic light. But from the moment Ferris turns to the camera to address the audience, we know that realism is out. Ferris and his adventures represent a teen's dream of glory: to have, at one's fingertips, the technical skills to sabotage the adult world's machinery of oppression and, at the tip of one's tongue, the perfect squelch for grownups' moralistic blather. Here is a dream as old as adolescence, and it is fun to be reminded of its ageless potency, especially in a movie as good-hearted as this one.