A man who has been exceedingly lucky in life finds himself with everything he’s ever wanted. Then, just as it seems he will lose it all, he does whatever it takes to ensure he doesn’t get his comeuppance, even if it means ignoring a few crucial moral boundaries.
A more cynical filmmaker would have turned that premise into, well, Woody Allen’s recent Match Point. But John Hughes’s films have always favored a pie-eyed idealism, and in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off he gives us a picture that is nothing short of inspirational. Because all Ferris (as if I have to tell you who he’s played by) wanted was the same thing we all want: to win. And he wins by accentuating the positive, even while everyone around him — especially his morose best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck, who was almost thirty when he made this movie, playing Bert to Broderick’s Ernie) — insists on indulging a negative frame of mind. Ferris is also a pragmatic optimist. He understands, in the way of so many teenagers already nostalgic for the ever-vanishing present, that he won’t have many more opportunities to be a winner before middle-class adulthood claims him for a lifetime of comfortable boredom, before he shuffles off for that long, slow decline down the middle of the road. And that’s pretty cool.
Special features
I was really hoping for an awkward “reunion” segment where we could watch Ruck, Broderick, Mia Sara, Ben Stein, John Hughes, and Jennifer Grey interact in our post-Bueller world. Surely most people want updates on some of these people — and those cast members who seem to have dropped off the face of the Earth would welcome a little nostalgic ego-massaging.
As for the two who still have healthy showbiz careers, Broderick and Stein have never been able to divorce themselves from this film. Not that they’re openly complaining. Broderick gave a new interview to accompany the making-of and casting-of documentaries included here. He doesn’t reveal anything Earth-shattering, unless you count his premonition that he was secretly worried, even before the film’s release, about being type-cast. Grey and Ruck show up here, too. But Mia Sara – the biggest “what ever happened to” in the movie – appears only in archived footage from 1986. And John Hughes comes to us from interviews conducted in the ’80s (one could probably get a more accurate read on their provenance by carbon-dating the precise angle of his feathered mullet). Of course, Hughes has been too busy not directing movies for 15 years to show up. He did make time to record a commentary track for an earlier DVD edition, but bizarrely, it isn’t included on the new edition. Too bad.
Since Ben Stein has become an oddball celebrity in the years following the film’s release, they decided to do an in-depth interview with the man behind the monotone, in which he namechecks Nixon five or six times. He also recalls bumping into Kurt Cobain in an elevator: Stein didn’t immediately know who Cobain was, but Kurt spontaneously burst into the line that has become Stein’s permanent contribution to the culture: “Bueller? Buhller?” Stein then wrecks the party by mentioning that George W. Bush did the same thing the first time they met.
