John Cusack began his career as a charming, intelligent adolescent boy who fell madly in love with smart and beautiful young women in such movies as The Sure Thing and Say Anything…. These two films are two of my all-time favourite teenage romances; they’re well done movies about smart young people that fall in love.
In Rob Reiner’s classic, The Sure Thing, Cusack plays Gib, a bright freshman at a small liberal arts college in New England who just hasn’t quite learned to apply himself. In his English class, the only class he appears to be taking because that’s the class where he meets ‘the girl’, he writes a paper on ‘how to eat pizza without burning the roof of your mouth’, which would have been a whimsical delight had it not been obscured by absent grammar and creative spelling. And that’s kind of what Gib is like: a gem that needs a bit of cleaning up. He can wax on romantically about the stars with sincerity, and when he’s about to have sex he won’t just be thinking self-congratulatory thoughts. He philosophizes, too: who invented liquid soap and why? But the rough edges are what Allison, the class brain and beauty, sees when she first meets him, when he takes an instant liking to her, and she takes an instant loathing towards him. Allison takes notes on absolutely everything, and who needs to be advised, by her professor, to eat food that she thinks is bad for her and to talk to people with mismatched outfits. In short, she needs to learn to ‘live life’.
On their Christmas break they both are heading to Los Angeles; she to visit her long-distance soon-to-be-lawyer boyfriend and he to meet his ‘sure thing’, the holy grail of sex to the adolescent boy, a guaranteed one-night-stand. They both end up taking and losing the same ride and are thrown together on the road through hardships, hitch-hiking, abject poverty, and starvation. Of course, they share experiences and hotel rooms – where they argue over who has to sleep on the floor – and they fall in love. But although the road story is clichéd, their romance is smart and real.
It’s so refreshing to see a movie where the girl is not merely a prize to be won and a blithering, beautiful idiot, but, instead, an intelligent, driven, independent young woman. And there’s more between them than a mutual physical attraction; they bicker about everything, including the name of the baby made out of scarves that they pretend to be expecting. He respects and loves her more for her obsessive-compulsive tendencies and she learns to love him for his childish, charming habits. The movie has no real gratuitous scenes and when they finally kiss at the end, it’s so much more meaningful and romantic than most romances to follow.
Cusack is probably best known for the boom-box-touting-Clash-t-shirt-sporting Lloyd Dobbler from writer/director Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut Say Anything…. Lloyd is a recent high school graduate with no real plans for the future except to try to spend as much time as possible with the girl of his dreams. He falls head-over-heels for Diane Court (Ione Skye), the smartest person in the school, soon heading to Oxford, who is gorgeous but doesn’t know it, and who doesn’t even know who he is. After he calls to ask her out to a graduation party and she agrees, in what must be one of the best phone scenes ever to be captured on film because of Cusack’s constant movement while talking, she looks him up in the yearbook.
He’s not quite as smart as she is, but he’s smart enough, a gentleman to the core, and crazy about her. And over the course of the summer before she has to leave for college, they fall truly, madly, and deeply in love. He’s also reliable unlike the other main male in her life and the film, Diane’s father, who has just been caught stealing from the elderly clients of his home for the elderly.
There’s depth in this movie. Like The Sure Thing, it’s a clever story about smart people, that’s about more than silly romance; it is about real relationships and coming to grasps with how life is tough. It’s full of truly romantic gestures and scenes; there’s also a lot of heart and even a bit of pathos. Crowe does a good job of exploring the weird relationship between Diane and her father who claims that she can say anything to him whilst he spouts nothing but lies to her about the source of their income. Whether or not Lloyd and Diane will stay together forever is immaterial; she has ambitions, he has no direction. This is a movie about sharing something and connecting with someone, and even if their relationship doesn’t last forever, they’ve both grown up and, oh that cliché ‘learned something’.
Both The Sure Thing and Say Anything… are fun and easy to digest movies that can be watched over and over and over again. Sometimes even in the same day. They don’t tug unnecessarily on your heartstrings and every bit of emotion they pull out of you is completely earned. Although they’re both now almost twenty years old, I haven’t seen a single teen romance movie in recent years that is more realistic and about more lovable characters than these. Say Anything… was Cusack’s last adolescent movie; he started playing adults afterwards and he’s made some great and often darker stuff as an adult, from Being John Malkovich to High Fidelity. But a part of me will always love, and maybe even secretly want to marry, a (slightly smarter) version of his charming earlier characters, Gib and Lloyd Dobbler. There’s something fundamentally lovable about those characters, which will keep them dear for generations to come.
This review was adapted from a review originally published in The Gargoyle, the University College undergraduate student newspaper at the University of Toronto.
Very thorough reviews. I’m afraid that I can’t actually contribute anything relevant on the reviews themselves, since I’ve never seen either of the movies in question.