SIXTEEN CANDLES
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1984) *** (out of four)
I know I've personally experienced landmark birthdays that were less than ideal. My eighteenth birthday I had to get up at 6:30 to work in a college dining hall for three hours, followed by two hours of classes, three more hours in the dining hall, a couple hours reading three mammoth chapters on Romanesque and Gothic Architecture and a three hour photo shoot for a newspaper. But at least everyone knew it was my birthday. In SIXTEEN CANDLES, Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald) goes through her sixteenth birthday without any of her family members remembering the big day.
SIXTEEN CANDLES was John Hughes' debut film, the first of three over the next three years to star Ringwald. In this film, as in PRETTY IN PINK, Ringwald exemplifies those of us who get the short end of the stratification stick that is high school, where certain people are popular because of physical attributes and the rest of us are left behind. Ringwald is in love with Jake, the athletic senior who is already involved with the prom queen, who is more beautiful and actually has breasts. (We know this for a fsee them at the beginning of the movie.)
Meanwhile, Ringwald is being lusted after by a freshman dork (Anthony Michael Hall) who makes a bet with his friends that he can bag Ringwald. The two instead have a meaningful conversation that night during a dance, in one of those Driver's Ed. simulators (and if there's anything that turns a woman on, it's a grainy film from the 60's produced in "Drivavision"), finding out they have the unrequited love thing in common, and Ringwald takes pity on Hall, giving him her panties to show his friends as evidence.
The news of this "conquest" gets back to Jake, who -- it turns out -- has an attraction to Ringwald, as one of those rare teenage guys who long for a woman of substance rather than beauty. It's all so reminiscent of Hughes' later film, PRETTY IN PINK, in which Ringwald is attracted to rich Andrew McCarthy but doesn't think she has a chance with him because she doesn't adhere to the superficial rules of the in-crowd. Here too, things work out in a life-affirming way that assures us love can break all boundaries. I mean, shoot, Hall gets laid by the prom queen.
I may be the only person to venture this opinion, but SIXTEEN CANDLES is a more entertaining, if not accurate film than the other Ringwald-Hughes collaborations (THE BREAKFAST CLUB, PRETTY IN PINK). It doesn't try to force drama like the other two, going instead for a more comedic focus in the midst of the usual teen movie conventions, like torturous school dances and wild parties. Hughes especially finds humor in the Chinese exchange student character Long Duk Dong, who discovers the joys of American life at the same dance and party that proves most other characters' undoing. Like most other aspects of the film, it would be offensive and disastrously unfunny if not handled in the proper way, which Hughes has actually done here, unlike the PRETTY PINK BREAKFAST CLUB films.
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