The Breakfast Club
“The Breakfast Club” illustrates something strange about how things sometimes work. It’s not a perfect movie. It’s not a perfectly acted movie, and it has a couple of brief interludes that date it, and not in a good way.
But there’s some irreducible truth contained in this film that has become only more evident with the passage of time, so that a movie that was a hit in 1985, and in its day seemed very contemporary, now steps out of its era with a hard-to-explain and yet unmistakable aura of timelessness.
It was written and directed by John Hughes, who, in the mid-1980s, owned the patent on a particular kind of youth-oriented film, and who introduced an ensemble of winning performers to enact his vision. A solid hit in its time, “The Breakfast Club” is essentially a chamber piece, practically a filmed play, in which five students sit in the library, stuck in “detention” on a Saturday.
They don’t know each other, but each embodies a high school archetype: the popular princess (Molly Ringwald), the school criminal ( Judd Nelson), the nerd (Anthony Michael Hall), the jock (Emilio Estevez) and the neurotic (Ally Sheedy). Over the course of the movie, they open up and become acquainted, but Hughes doesn’t make it easy for them.
Major conflicts continue throughout. In the end, something about the simplicity of the setup, the vivid individuality of the ensemble and the universality of the characters’ problems make “The Breakfast Club” leap out of its time. It’s not exactly great, but it’s a sort of masterpiece, and bound to last.
Special features include recent interviews with Sheedy and Ringwald, a 2008 documentary about the film, and contemporary “Today” show interviews, conducted with the cast by Jane Pauley. The digital transfer is up to the high standards of the Criterion Collection. — Mick LaSalle