Working-class kid Keith spends his days dreaming of becoming an artist while his anxious father (John Ashton) hopes he will settle for something more practical.
Keith also fantasises about the girl next door, Amanda Jones (Lea Thompson), who is ensconced into their school’s upper echelon.
When she breaks up with her cheating boyfriend Hardy (Craig Scheffer), Keith finds himself her unlikely rebound.
Keith’s seeming good fortune is a bombshell for his best friend, Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson), who has been quietly pining for him.
As Keith and Amanda prepare for their first date, Hardy plots his vengeance, while Watts wrestles with her feelings for her best friend.
The question becomes not whether the new couple will endure, but how their coming together will pull apart the world around them…
It is hard not to watch this movie without thinking of its predecessor.
Filmmakers will often return to similar themes and storylines - Howard Hawks with Rio Bravo, and Alfred Hitchcock with his ‘man on the run’ thrillers.
Some Kind of Wonderful was John Hughes’ attempt to make up for the concessions he made to the end of Pretty in Pink.
Tonally it is much darker, and more of a straight drama.
Watching this movie and Pretty in Pink, it hit me how much class has disappeared from movies like this.
Amanda Jones is the girl down the street but because of her relationship with Craig Scheffer’s Hardy she has been elevated in the school’s social hierarchy.
Aside from the climax, Jones is the most significant improvement on the template of its predecessor.
Whereas Pretty In Pink’s Blane (Andrew McCarthy) was a bit of a blank slate, Lea Thompson’s Amanda Jones is given an interiority.
Like the protagonist, she is trying to work out her own identity.
Our hero not only recognises the love he feels for his best friend, but the film does not treat Amanda as a catalyst for this realisation. She is given her own arc in which her breaking off from Keith is an act of independence - she does not feel any need to justify herself in relation to a man, or her old social set.
Keith also has to let go of the assumptions he has about her.
I have no real set feelings about lead Eric Stoltz. I have only seen a few of his performances, and this must be the most significant role I have seen him in.
My first awareness of him was probably the trivia about him playing Marty in Back to the Future.
He is well-cast as the artistically inclined Keith. He is more inherently intellectual and - crucially for the love story, there is a lack of horniness to the character that feels partly deliberate, and a result of the casting. Stoltz does not convey the kind of lust that was part of a lot of eighties teen movies.
The film also shows more nuance in how it presents Keith’s perspective. The character is more of a romantic, and does not seem that interested in Amanda as a sexual object.
There is a certain ambiguity, or maybe hypocrisy to the character - the fact the date turns into a test of Amanda’s substance as a person shows Keith is as capable of being superficial as anyone else.
The character is self-absorbed - the fact he cannot see Watts’ interest in him being the bleedingly obvious example - and the film punctures his assumed air of self-awareness. Stoltz manages to avoid tipping the character over into being cliche - one can imagine the character being played with a more overt lack of empathy, but Stoltz’s sincerity makes the character’s stumbles into misogyny more pointed.
Scheffer’s Hardy is more of an obvious problem, but Keith’s attitude and paranoia about Amanda is potentially more dangerous.
His feelings are not without merit - in a film that is aiming for realism, it makes sense that the character should be suspicious of his rapid change in romantic fortunes. But in the dinner scene, Keith is drawing on the same assumptions as Hardy.
It is a very nuanced character, and Stoltz does a very credible job. I do not think he has the same charisma or appeal as Ringwald, but his lowkey presence serving the more ensemble nature of this story.
As with Amanda Jones and Blane from Pretty in Pink, Watts is not a straight facsimile of Duckie.
She is the yin to Keith’s yang - from their blurring of gender roles, to the way she grounds Keith’s flights of fancy, they are a platonic couple from the outset.
This is personal bias but I also get more chemistry from Masterson and Stoltz than I do Ringwald and Cryer.
According to the actress, Watts was originally meant to have a more ambiguous gender expression (the two lovers’ names were also reversed in earlier drafts of the script). During the course of rewrites, Hughes switched the names between Stoltz and Masterson’s characters, and the newly christened Watts was reworked to be more of a conventional love interest.
Masterson is great, although I wished she was in the movie more.
The tone of this film is slightly more dramatic than Pretty in Pink. What humor there is comes from bad boy Duncan (Elias Koteas) who goes from being a potential antagonist to a friend - Koteas manages the difficult job of making the character amusing, but never loses the character’s sense of unpredictability or danger.
A fine film, and a fascinating companion piece to Pretty in Pink.
Related
No comments:
Post a Comment