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While “Pretty In Pink” is made up of many scenes that are somewhat more dramatic, my favorite scenes are certainly the less spoken ones where a boy attempts to gather enough courage to ask a girl on a date. The girl knows, and he knows, and ultimately nothing takes place.
To listen to such silence is to grasp the essence of an adolescent dilemma, which is, dreams so bigger than confidence. “Pretty In Pink” is a movie that pays attention to these intricate details. Although it is not a great film, it has some moments when the audience is likely to think, yes, being sixteen was precisely like that.
Molly Ringwald plays Andie Walsh, a girl from the wrong end of town who has a working-class name. Besides, her mother chickened out of her life some years back. Her father, who is jobless, has to take care of her, and his first words when she wakes him up one morning are, “Where am I?”. To make ends meet, Andie has a part-time job in a record store in the mall, and she wears clothes that look like Goodwill rummaged from a 1950s fashion show.
Andie has a soft spot for the rich Blane (Andrew McCarthy) which further complicates her life at a new high school where most kids are a mixture of snobbish and spoiled.
When she is not crushing on Blane, Andie spends her free time with her close friends Duckie (Jon Cryer) who provides comic relief with his antics. He is the typical teenage boy dressed in a way that would never be popular with girls, and Iona (Annie Potts) who is in her thirties and keeps changing her hairstyles.
The movie’s plot is ancient and I mean virtually age-old. It is about a wealthy boy and a poor girl who fall in love. The conflicts that arise stem from the fact that the boy’s friends are elitist snobs and the girls is embarrassed of her dilapidated home. Unlike other love stories, this one has a happy ending. Being that universal reality apply to all rich and poor teenagers, I just wish the filmmakers would come up with a different film that addressed the basic truths of the movie.
The filmmakers could have given one of the lover’s parents a different ethnic background. This is still not very original but at least it would make an attempt to prevent consecutive copies of the ageless theme of Horatio Alger.
The movie still has one glaring fault, wich is the part played by Steff McKee James Spader. He plays the role of a feeble, chain-smoking wealthy snob which is Blane’s best friend. He is so deeply embedded in his character that he makes Andie feel as though Blane would want to ‘date’ a ‘mutant’ and exaggerates how shocked he’s trying to pretend to be. His snobbery is so deeply rooted in his character that it could destroy the entire plot.
There is one golden Steff quote: Money really means nothing to me. Do you think I’d treat my parents’ house this way if it did? However, with Spader playing him, Steff looks much too advanced in age to be a teenager. Much of his material is problematic simply for that reason. It gives the impression of being a rather sinister twenty-five-year-old hanging around high school hallways – a Ghost of Proms Past. He is far too old for these parts.
“Pretty in Pink” is on balance a very touching and mostly authentic film sprinkled with some humor. John Hughes, who has written this film, seems to copy the very essence of his Sixteen Candles, where he had Ringwald play the part of a girl who had a crush on a senior boy and knew how to interact with the class geek. But Ringwald is morphing into an actress who expresses depth and vulnerability without being sentimental or distanced. In this film, as in most of her films, she does have in my opinion, quite a few moments of small truths with her co-stars, Cryer and Potts.
The best twist in the film is the character created by Potts. She first appears wearing leather and chains, and the next time we see her, she has one of those beehive hairstyles from the 1960s. She is always changing her “look,” and when she finally decides to go with conservative good taste, the choice appears to be the most “dramatic” of all her choices.
Pretty in Pink, I guess, is proof that there is a reason some old tales never seem to vanish. We can guess all the cliches, we know half of the developments. But there is immense pleasure, and satisfaction as well when this boy and this girl, who has so clearly been paired together, end up together. There is also a feeling that Ringwald, like the young Elizabeth Taylor, has that blend of magic that will make her break and mend boys’ hearts for a long time and that gives her the chance to grow into an actress who does not care for a long time.
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