On weekend while his parents are away for the weekend and leave the running of the opulent family home to him a friend of his pranks him by ordering a call girl to his address. She knocks revealing herself to be black and trans. In a disarming exchange, he sends her off with care fare and money for her time and she gives him the number of someone more like what he was thinking. This is the young and golden Lana. All fine 'n' dandy with a montage of initiation sex deluxe. He's still young and callow, though, so when, the next morning she bills him for $300 he has to think quickly and get to the bank to plunder his bonds. When he gets back she's gone with a conspicuously expensive art piece. Getting that back is the cause of a series of misadventures, traps, cons big and small, and life lessons that in a few days supply more practical education that he is going to get at Princeton. If something realistically comparable to this story was told in the 40s it would end with Joel being made a man. But this is the early '80s and what it suggests is that, in learning the elemental skill of negotiation with the worst life can hurl, Joel becomes a better person. This is complicated, though. read on.
The thing to get out of the way first is that this is the film that broke Tom Cruise who acquired Hollywood stardom by it which he retains to this day. Hindsight would suggest he was implanted in his own future by this part (not his first but close enough) as this story of wresting control from hostile forces describes most of his roles hereafter. Here, not knowing what is to become of him, just like his character, he is a good looking teenager and that's almost all he has to be. The nuance comes with how he injects the decency flaw into scenes that will escalate to it becoming a strength. When gangster pimp Guido is at the passenger window with a pistol trying to get Lana out of the car, Joel recognises that falling apart like his friend in the back seat is only going to worsen the situation so he expresses a fragile resolve that seems to surprise himself until he can get them out of the immediate situation safely. But he's left a signature which turns up later. It's a good turn.
The other thing that Cruise does here, inadvertently, is to establish one of the decade's hero templates. Whether it's him or Ferris Bueller '80s teens were lifting off to localised greatness to fulfil the great pitch of the time as the reign of Reagan trickled down (or said it did). These don't always travel well through time and the decades have left Ferris looking like a bully (or even a figment of Campbell's psychosis) but Joel still comes across as, more or less, ok.
Circumstances see to his failing some of the high achievement aspects of his senior high school record but his acceptance of Lana's suggestion that they team up and use their resources. By this, he is not just being pragmatic but bucking the stolid system of tokenism that his formal schooling imposes. He has lost touch with the societal handrail and embraces the path that proves his prowess at business to exponentially greater degree. He has learned the advice his toxic friend gave him at the beginning to just say, "what the fuck?" and keep driving on. Cleverly, a scene where that friend, Miles, is confronted with the effects of that advice, he calls it bullshit that he just said in the moment, his shallowness is exposed by Joel's successful employment of the line. It's just occurred to me that Miles with his bravado and Hectoring ridicule and pranking of Joel is a clear prototype of Ferris; take the whimsical charm away and he's just an entitled, bourgeois oaf.
Night Shift from the previous year treated sex work similarly as a business that could be done along the same lines as any other service industry with the workers getting a much better deal out of it. The peak scene of this is the massive house party managed by Tom as a roving spruiker and Lana on personnel and PR management. You could write this entire scene off as an ad for underage tricking; there is no resolution of the issue offered (one client looks about 12 and his having to get home early is even joked about). There's a joke about how many sex workers present for duty but there is also the complaint of exhaustion by one of them afterwards. They might well be making more dosh than normal but haven't they just been in the service economy's version of a sweatshop? And aren't the bosses still the ones really raking it in?
At the end, Joel having impressed the Princeton recruiter who was sorted during the house brothel party ("Princeton could use a guy like Joel"), and having bargained his new fortune for the return of the goods in the ransacked house, having kept his mouth shut through his mother's chiding of him for damaging an ornament (happened during the bargaining scene), and having seemingly smoothed the business side of his relationship with Lana is left with a joke that if she wants a relationship with him it is gonna cost her. She didn't reply when he asked if the sex on a train jaunt was to distract him from the burglary of the house. Was she noncommittal or offended by the question? Unclear.
What is clear is that, in their final moments with each other, strolling around the greenery of a Chicago park, she is not deemed good enough for him now. He might well step up to the years of study and specialisation as an MBA and grow up to fight Gordon Gekko on the seas of high finance but he cannot be dragging a call girl around on his arm. Chuck is happy to walk off into the sunset with Belinda at the end of Night Shift but he's a grownup, Joel is probably a future Republican donor. He was probably instrumental, come to think of it, in getting his chum Brett Kavanaugh off the hook for the Supreme Court spot.
I've said so little about this film as a film and I should say something as it's worth it. There is a kind of tradeoff arrangement here between fantasy and reality which in turn plays on the audience's covetous relationship with the lifestyle on the screen. We begin with shots of a working city by night and there is a bookending sequence to suggest that, whatever happens between those two points, the grand old town and the cogs and wheels that keep it running endure. Then we are plunged into an inky blackness and find an eyeball turning as though checking for threats. We roll out to see that it's Tom Cruise's eye behind the screen of his Ray Bans. As the synthesised score by Tangerine Dream bubbles on, he speaks to camera: "the dream is always the same." Before relating an anxiety nightmare in which his distraction by a beautiful woman makes him impossibly late for an exam.
There is a lot of dream/reality tension in Lana, as well. She first appears as a young woman entering the house as a sex worker, courteous within the bounds of professional caution. She continues to tease, taunt and play Joel until circumstances throw their interests together. Rebecca De Mornay brings a lot of detail to her turn, stepping up to the depth of the screenplay to give us a young but heavily experienced survivor belying, by our assumption, the fragility of her beauty. Are the scenes in the sex montage at the beginning real, though, or Joel's art directed memories? I would lean to the latter. The famous scene (not a montage) on the train is intended as sex plus love in a risky setting, a coming of age prize, and it's served up with a lot more grit.
And then, it's only a little personal because it is still just business.
The world building of the rich and influential is consummate (I remember being dazzled by the massive graphic equalizer the Goodsens had as part of their stereo system) even to the social distance between the opulence and the grimy rust coloured night world of greater Chicago. We see a lot of the textural cheek of the '80s mainstream which had incorporated the French New Wave traits of the movie brats in the '70s but added a lot more comedy. This, like Splash or Ferris Bueller or even The Breakfast Club could never have been '70s movies. That's not because the '80s drove mainstream cinema further into gritty realism but further away from it. The tropes, tricks on the eye, casual satire and clean sheen image were part of the consumables of the movies, along with soundtrack albums with neon cover art.
Tom Cruise still peers over the frames of his Ray Bans the way that Ferris would and so many other teen movies and those that promised a kind of rock and roll adventure. But the Ray Bans were expensive and the rock 'n' roll more likely to be Huey Lewis than Suicidal Tendencies. The only real rebellion in these tales of growing up fast was against personal timidity, the social organisation was never in any danger of so much as a few questions and they shook it off like dandruff. This was the same time as the look of punk was being absorbed by cereal commercials and the spirit of it scraped off and discarded. This and its like gave every kid in the audience the promise of riches and power through saying, "what the fuck" and all their parents the assurance that they need only let the wild oats be sown and they would fall where they landed without further growth. Too heavy for a fun movie? Well, the movie is fun. It's even more fun now watching a future megastar begin his stardom with iconic status as he slides in socks jocks and shirt to the strains of Bob Seeger singing about old time rock 'n' roll. Well, the old time rock 'n' roll wears the new clean line movie style as well as ever. But it's still old time rock 'n' roll.
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