(John Hughes, US, 1984, 4K restoration, 92 mins)
"They fucking forgot my birthday."
--Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald)
I was still in my teens when John Hughes' directorial debut made its first appearance. I was in college, not high school, but the film wasn't specifically directed at teenagers. It was about them, but unlike those teen films where the adults natter away nonsensically like characters from out of a Charlie Brown animated special, the adults were fully realized individuals. Nonetheless, the film wasn't especially interested in them. It was all about the teens.
For the Chicago-based Hughes, a veteran of National Lampoon and Second City, movies about adults would come later. Some would do well both critically and commercially; some would not, but they never held much interest for me. Not films about adults per se, but Hughes' films about adults, like She's Having a Baby and Planes, Trains and Automobiles (and I feel the same way about his family films, like the Home Alone series). His films about teens are not without imperfections, and some aspects haven't aged well, but he put his heart into the teen trio he made with Molly Ringwald, which began with Sixteen Candles and ended with Pretty in Pink.
It's interesting, in retrospect, that Hughes chose a young woman to represent his thoughts about the terrors and triumphs of adolescence, but it's unlikely the films would've worked as well with male protagonists. Ringwald's Samantha Baker, in Sixteen Candles, isn't an everykid; she's very specifically female. She isn't the most popular girl at her suburban high school, but nor is she the least popular. She isn't a nerd, she isn't friendless, and she isn't unattractive, but nor is she attractive in the conventional cheerleader way. She's taller and her hair is shorter, but she's every bit as fashionable as Cher Horowitz in Clueless, albeit in a quieter, less expensive manner. In other words, she carries herself with confidence, and boys notice her--just not the one boy whose attentions she would most like to attract.
The joke, as it were, is on her. In a strictly visual--as opposed to a narrative--sense, Hughes doesn't depict Sam's auspicious 16th birthday from her point of view. Consequently, we see Jake Ryan (former model Michael Schoeffling) noticing her long before she does. She's a sophomore, and she doubts that such a handsome, popular senior would notice someone like her--especially since he has a pretty, prom queen girlfriend--but this isn't the kind of movie where he realizes at the last minute that the girl of his dreams has been right there all the time. No, he picks up a sex quiz meant for Sam's friend in which she confesses a fantasy that she's saving herself for him, and he sees her clearly for the first time.
If she carries herself with confidence, it doesn't mean she's confident. In that sense, I suppose she is an everykid or an every-person, because it's a pretty relatable state of affairs. She even describes herself as "utterly forgettable." She isn't, of course, though Jake may never have noticed her if it wasn't for the quiz. His character is purposefully underwritten; Hughes always, always privileges Sam's hopes and fears. And she's already feeling vulnerable, because her family has forgotten her birthday while preparing for her older sister's wedding. Both sets of grandparents are in town, and so she ends up sleeping on the living room sofa. Though her house looks like a mansion from the outside, there simply aren't enough rooms for two parents, three siblings, two older couples, and a foreign exchange student.
Jake, on the other hand, lives in a literal mansion. Hughes never once suggests that Sam likes him because he's rich, and he turns out to be something other than a snob, but in our more economically-divided era, it's a detail that's impossible to miss, not least because of Jake's red Porsche, expensive haircut, and Ralph Lauren sweater vests. His father also has a Rolls Royce and a wine cellar…which gets destroyed during a raucous party.
If Sam and Jake got together after the quiz interception, there would be no movie, so Hughes throws every conceivable obstacle in their way. That's where the humor comes in, because Jake is a straight man in every sense of the word, but Sixteen Candles is a genuinely funny film with plenty of throwaway gags that betray Hughes' Lampoon origins, some involving up-and-coming Chicago kids John and Joan Cusack. It's also where the problems arise, but more on that later. The marketing around the film included an image of Sam and Jake sitting on either side of a birthday cake, so no one watching it could possibly have been in any doubt as to where things would end up: Sam would get the guy and the birthday recognition that had eluded her the entire time.
Before she arrives at that fairy tale ending, she has to resist the advances of persistent gnat Ted Farmer (Anthony Michael Hall, with whom Ringwald would reunite in The Breakfast Club). It's to Hall's credit, through a combination of crack timing and uninhibited physicality, that Ted is more of a harmless goof than a serious harasser, because he doesn't understand that when a girl says she isn't interested, it's best to leave well enough alone. In Hughes' optimistic worldview, Sam and Ted can be friends once they've come to an understanding, not least when he "bags a babe" of his own. That he ends up with the least likely romantic partner signifies the triumph of this particular nerd. In the process, though Hughes risks portraying Ted as the kind of guy who will only grow more boorish and entitled with time.
Sam's self-obsessed sister, Ginny (Blanche Baker, Carroll Baker's daughter), who is accustomed to attracting the kind of male attention she craves, represents another obstacle to her happiness, and the distinction between the two only grows throughout the film. In Hughes' eyes, Sam, the sister with character, deserves a fulfilling romantic partnership, while Ginny's marriage to obnoxious "bohunk" Rudy (John Kapelos, another Second City alum) seems unlikely to end well. Though the wedding sequence in which Ginny arrives stoned out of her mind on muscle relaxants is meant to play as comedy, there's a sense that Hughes feels these buffoonish characters are beneath him. They're designed to make the audience laugh--and to make Sam and Jake seem sane and sensible in comparison--and that's about it. Maybe that isn't the worst thing in the world, but he doesn't extend the same courtesy to them to redeem themselves that he does to Ted.
As for Long Duk Dong, it's possible that in 1984, Hughes felt he was being magnanimous by giving the film's sole Asian character a love interest of his own, but the relationship is also played primarily for laughs. In this case, he set the actors, Gedde Watanabe and Deborah Pollack, free to give in to their wackiest impulses. That's how they remember it, at any rate, in the joint interview included with the new Blu-ray. Pollack adds that she often stood on an apple box so that she would appear taller than her screen partner. Though Watanabe has taken numerous hits over the years for playing a character perceived as racially insensitive, he emphasizes how much fun he had making the movie, and it's still the role for which he's best known. If anyone should take a hit, it should be Hughes.
Then there's Jake's girlfriend, Caroline (Haviland Morris), another unfortunate stereotype, less for the way the actress plays her, than for the way the film treats her as a sparkly bauble to be passed from one man to another. Even nice-guy Jake jokes, "I could violate her ten different ways if I wanted to" after she passes out at his party. Like I said, he isn't exactly a comedian, but we're supposed to find her story arc amusing, since Hughes presents her as a shallow striver who gets her comeuppance only to find an unexpected happy ending--a development he would turn inside out for Weird Science in which two Frankenstein-like nerds (including Anthony Michael Hall) build their own Bride--but it mostly plays as misogynist.
The Blu-ray's other special features include interviews with Kapelos, casting director Jackie Burch, actor-turned-director Adam Rifkin ("New Wave Nerd"), camera operator Gary Kibbe (standing in for the late Bobby Byrne), and composer Ira Newborn. There's also a video essay from Soraya Roberts, who has more critical than complimentary things to say about the film, and a 2008 featurette featuring Hall, Morris, Paul Dooley, Justin Henry, screenwriter Diablo Cody (Juno), and director Michael Lehman (Heathers).
The absence of Ringwald from any of these extras is a real shame. She has spoken eloquently in The New Yorker and in other forums about her work with Hughes, specifically The Breakfast Club, but her voice is missing here.
Some of the actors in the film, like Schoeffling and Watanabe, were in their 20s when they starred in Hughes' first feature, but Ringwald was a real-deal teenager. Her cast mates remember details about her, like the fact that her father was a talented pianist or that she was often listening to Kate Bush at the time. It left me wanting to hear more about who she was in relation to Samantha Baker, a character Hughes wrote specifically for her, and who she became because of--and perhaps even in spite of--this deceptively self-confident, romantically insecure, ultimately timeless teenage heroine.
The Special Edition version of Sixteen Candles is out now on Arrow Video.
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