CAN'T BUY ME LOVE
A film review by Dan Frank
Copyright 1987 Dan Frank
Do you harbor secret reservations about the quality of John Hughes's films? Granted, his record is pretty good, even allowing for the dismal characters in PRETTY IN PINK, but his scripts have always been marred by an inability to see past the social stereotypes he is trying to send up. Thus the kids in THE BREAKFAST CLUB, while they learn to respect each other, could still be from different planets for all we know. We get no sense that they are all, under the the mannerisms, just human beings.
There is a funny time around the beginning of high school when kids start developing what it's fashionable to call "identity." Commensurate with their lack of sophistication, they tend to ask "what" they are, rather than "who." Kids who were formerly friends drift apart as they decide they are jocks, nerds, freaks, and so forth. They are uncomfortable stepping outside those categories, and fear associations and actions that might leave them adrift without a peer group and the sense of self that it provides. Just as adolescence is partly a process of defining oneself by these peer groups rather than by one's family, the difficult transition to adulthood is partly about moving from "what" to "who."
CAN'T BUY ME LOVE is about some young people at an Arizona high school trying to traverse the no man's land between group and self, and having a hard time of it. Ronald is a member of an all-male group of "nerds," but is consumed with anger and envy at the lifestyles of the "popular" kids, and desire for the head cheerleader, Cindy. Ronald decides that Cindy can be his ticket to the in group, and "buys" her for a month for $1000. Despite Cindy's certainty that you can't buy popularity, Ronald in fact becomes the New Kid in Town, the most popular senior, discarding in the process not only his old friends but also Cindy, who had discovered in the "old" Ronald qualities she admired and wanted.
This is a difficult and often painful story, told with sensitivity and imagination. There are none of the mean, bigoted stereotypes of PRETTY IN PINK; we are able to like and care for Ronald's new friends as much as his old ones. This isn't REVENGE OF THE NERDS, either, although we come to realize that revenge is precisely what Ronald really wanted. The price of that almost total revenge is a terrible self-knowledge and isolation.
I felt that CAN'T BUY ME LOVE eluded perfection in its last moments due to a morally weak ending. Such is Hollywood, though, that it probably wouldn't have made it into distribution with the one it really deserved. That's a small price to pay for what is in every other way a wise and well-told story of growing up the hard way.
CAN'T BUY ME LOVE gets the "Just Short of Perfect" rating, which means, "Go see it, for full price if necessary, at a good theatre." [It's not by John Hughes, by the way.]
-- Dan Frank
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