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The Unexpected Heaviosity of Ferris Bueller's Day Off
I missed Ferns Bueller's Day Off on the first pass, so I never quite understood what all the hubbub was about. 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. More often than not, I am really just a very big asshole.
Notwithstanding this, last winter I got sick, so sick I was reduced to raiding my landlord's DVD collection. 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. He also had Ferns Bueller.
I watched the film in a state of growing astonishment. It was, without a doubt, the most sophisticated teen movie I had ever seen. I wasn't entirely sure it qualified as a teen movie at all. 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.
More than this, though, Hughes performed an astounding ontological feat. He lured viewers into embracing his film as an escapist farce, then hit them with a pitch-perfect exploration of teen angst. He snuck genuine art past the multiplex censors.
I needn't labor the basic plot-kid fakes being sick, outwits dopey grownups, gallivants around Chicago with pals. Hughes is, like any decent Aristotelian, more concerned with character.
Ferris himself (Matthew Broderick, unbearably young) comes across as a charming manipulator utterly devoted to his own enjoyments. We initially encounter him playing sick on his bed. It is a pathetically stagy performance and he seems mildly disappointed when his doting parents fall for it. We get a few scenes of him mugging for the camera, and the introduction of his inept nemesis, the dean of students, Ed Rooney.
The scene shifts to a sleek, modern home, propped up on stilts and perched at the edge of a bluff. We cut to a dark, sarcophagus-like bedroom, littered with medicine bottles...