FOOTLOOSE @ 40

Ren moves with his mum to a rural town where they have family connections. There they find the town has legislated itself back to the days of the Pilgrim Fathers where teachers talk of book banning (and then burning) and the lead vocalist of the Statschurch has pushed the act of dance into abolition. The town's teens adopt a kind of '50s as imagined by the '80s look and sneak off to the local drive-in diner to blare the kind of Toto-esque dreck that was regulation in the culture that had never quite done punk right. And, they dance. Then the preacher man appears to make sure his daughter has enough pocket money for pizza and the whole thing collapses into an anhedonic void. Chicago mover Ren has his work cut out.

The reason I avoided this film at the time of its release is the same that kept me away from others like Flashdance or Xanadu: they were featured as clips on Countdown for weeks at a time and looked like pants. I remember being over at a friend's for dinner and someone there, among the kewl inner city post-punques, admitted to being curious about Footloose and it was like saying they wanted to try out discipline pornography. Career beneficiary Kevin Bacon talked about his spiky hair in an interview, saying it had started a trend. While it's more early Ziggy than Johnny Rotten, it's still a style that had splashed across the pages of checkout magazines for latter part of the previous decade. So last night's view was my first and I did it because I wanted to get into how '80s it would be and, like Class last week, get my knives out for a hit job. Trouble is, it's actually pretty good.

Once you clear the absurd premise (though it's based on a real case) you'll see a surprisingly grown up piece of '80s teen rebellion cinema that feels very comfy to walk around in. John Lithgow's Reverend Moore begins the movie with a screaming sermon about his role as the town's moral shepherd. Afterwards, when Ren is meeting some of the locals, someone mentions the banning of Slaughterhouse Five from the library and Ren calls it a good book. When facing off the resulting icy stares, he digs in an calls it a classic. The guy whose banned the book says that Ren must like reading and makes it sound like a barb.

That's the kind of thing I feared the movie was going to do, bang all the nuance down and harvest the dramatic spikes and outcrops. But after this start, these begin smoothing out as we get to see depth in the characters, including Rev. Hardarse. His zeal is given motivation from a family tragedy in which his son died in a crash while zonked on booze (and presumably, too much dancin') but it's not really needed. It's actually pretty easy to forget until they remember to bring it out again. Nevertheless, the church leader's influence over the town's culture manages to play both as caricature and character. Allowing this as a viewer requires some doublethink but it can work and, if it does, the big underlying theme is rendered visible.

In 1984 Ronald Reagan was gearing up for his second term. For four long years he had been marshalling the wizards of trickledown economics (i.e. bullshitters who got away with it) and elevating the profiles of moral majority (who were neither) interests until a senior staffer defended the despoiling of forests by saying that Armageddon was around the corner so who cared about the environment. And let he then, the dogs of capitalism call'ed Reganomics, wild in the streets and hungry. You can read up on Reagan at your leisure. It's really no stretch to see the town in the movie as the model of Reagan McFagin-ville. Between the redneck boys who challenge Ren to a joust of tractor chicken (it's won by a shoelace which you'll have to see to understand) and the parents zealots who actually do end up burning books (so are they in favour of the concept of property or not?). This last act gives Lithgow's preacher a moment of believable and relieving depth as he prevents it continuing. At home he fights both wife and daughter (which is when the spectre of the son gets dusted off again) and it squeezes the narrative effectively.

I realise this article's getting all sloppy but that's in response to the strange way this film plays out, sometimes against itself, but ends up being thoroughly watchable. Part of this is due to performance. Kevin Bacon as Ren was not a newcomer to the screen (he has a pretty solid kill scene in Friday the 13th for starters) but this was his breakthrough. He gives Ren a quiet intensity that barely masks a growing anger at the worst of the town. Chris Penn gets to raise his character's goofiness into more serious territory. Sarah Jessica Parker pushes personality into Rusty that might have effectively remained a functional character. 

But my money goes to the one in the cast who did not climb to the celestium after this film, Lori Singer. Not only is she solid as the Reverend's daughter Ariel there's a moment I noted that will stick with me. She and Ren are in his car and getting closer to each other in their prolonged love/hate courtship. Ren breaks the mood by regressing into his adolescence and telling her she's probably been through a few guys. Her expression deflates, her face is asking "again?" before it hardens up again and she's back in self-medicating sass-girl mode. After that, she is beyond viewer dismissal, not just a romantic interest or the rebel child of the preacher, she's a rounded player and worth the trouble.

Yes, this is an '80s movie so you get the big inspiring training montage where Ren transforms himself into a dance warrior from a Wagner opera. But you also get an impressive teen stunt where Ariel tries to get out of one moving car and into another with an oncoming lorry charging like a megaton bull (don't say that aloud; people will look at you). And it is an '80s movie with a big public meeting scene in which a teenager schools the old duffers on the council. And it is an '80s movie in the the big dance off at the end (you are not going to convince me that that is a spoiler) while the big Kenny Loggins number blasts out of the speakers. But that's probably why you started watching in the first place.

When that was happening, I asked myself if I actually would have enjoyed this one at the time and I couldn't quite find the answer. As a recent Griffith University graduate with a lot of cinema theory under my belt and a life long allegiance to one rationalisation under Godard, part of me stayed away. But that was under the assumption that the movie would be far more clumsily didactic than it was. As someone who has always enjoyed the pop end of culture, however big and clumsy it gets, big football chanting pop songs, eye-piercing colour schemes and advertising fonts (especially in the '80s) and big goopy movies like this. I would have had no trouble recognising the look and feel borrowed from the previous decade's New Hollywood auteurs (this film never looks like Grease, even in the finale). I would have smirked at the radio fodder attempts at noo wave music and the fashions that made everyone as criminally vanilla as Ally Sheedy after the makeover scene in The Breakfast Club. I might have felt intrigued by the absence of a reason for Ren and his mother to trade big, fun Chicago for the modern Roanoke (I kept wondering if it was DV-related).

The fact is that Footloose surprised me. While I was never convinced of the gravity of Reverend Moore's zeal it was played with enough depth to allow me to put it on the fable shelf and follow the more immediate journey of acceptance and compassion. No, it's not Last Temptation but nor is it Porky's and whether it's a serious critique peeping out of the blouse of a dance movie or not, it kind of ... works.