St. Elmo's Fire

I first saw the classic 1985 high school movie The Breakfast Club when I was a senior in high school. It was a movie about a group of high school kids from different cliques realizing they've actually got a whole lot in common. I just saw its spiritually similar counterpart, St. Elmo's Fire, having recently (in the scheme of things!) graduated from college. It's a movie about a bunch of college friends who slowly grow apart and get pulled in different directions as they enter "the real world." That's a pretty nice contrast, right there, and the fact that the movies were released just months apart and share three major actors (Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, and Ally Sheedy) will keep the two films forever linked. So, how do they compare, and did St. Elmo's Fire live up to The Breakfast Club's status as a timeless '80s classic? The answer to the latter is a wishy-washy "yes and no." St. Elmo's Fire actually comes off as a strange mix of "ahead of its time" and "completely dated and of its time." The recurring theme in the movie, if it has one, is that even after college these kids still have a lot of growing up (and a bit of growing apart) to do. Aimlessness, lack of ambition, and the inability to commit are just three examples of the things holding some of them back from marriage, grad school, and even just moving out of the parents' house. It was in this regard that the film felt a bit contemporary; my generation is increasingly becoming known as the "Boomerang" or "Peter Pan" Generation, in that so many of we current twenty-somethings with college degrees are stuck living with parents, marrying later on or not at all, and being stuck in dead-end jobs. Funny, then, that a movie that came out before half of us had been born was able to hone in on our very modern day plights. Having said that, this was unmistakably and entirely a product of the 1980s. Everyone's doing cocaine and no one smokes weed at any point. Conflicts are built around severe credit card debt and the idea of a woman wanting to establish her career before getting married at 22. An intense break-up scene comes to a head when the ex-couple argues vigorously over how to divvy up the record collection. And I mean, just look at Rob Lowe's hair on the Blu-ray cover. Frankly, I'm shocked AIDS never came up and that there wasn't more synth-pop or hair metal. I think what surprised me most about St. Elmo's Fire was realizing, when I was reading about it after watching it and before making this post, that it was never really considered a good movie, even its own time. I mean, no, it wasn't a great movie, but quite frankly neither was The Breakfast Club; that was just a slightly heavy-handed celebration of '80s youth with a generic and silly "we're not so different after all" takeaway that had enough iconic moments to qualify as a classic. St. Elmo's Fire seems much less acclaimed, but I thought it was at least as good on all the technical levels like writing, acting, and tone, and perhaps even better when it came to delivering a more nuanced story. If nothing else, it was interesting to see such an all-star cast of familiar faces almost thirty years younger all on the same screen. Hearing Demi Moore admit, at the movie's climax, that she "never thought she'd feel so old at 22" was a priceless moment for a number of reasons.