I was about to go into fifth grade that summer. I was at my dad's office watching his television. I caught a movie with Matthew Broderick that I had never seen.
"That's Ferris Bueller's Day Off," my dad said.
My dad taped it on Showtime when it came on later that day. What a film and I hadn't even seen the first half. I had to go to summer daycare at my school that Monday. My dad asked if I could watch it. They ended up letting anyone who had seen it watch it. Imagine 15 fourth through sixth grade boys in a dark kindergarten room watching Ferris take the Ferrari out, sing in a parade and get the girl all while putting one over on everyone. We all dreamed of being Ferris Bueller. We wanted the popularity, the charisma, to be a person that always made it happen, who never surrendered, who believed you could never go to far.
While most guys identified with the cool nerds in “Weird Science” and “Sixteen Candles”, we all wanted to be Ferris Bueller. He was in total control of his destiny.
John Hughes had a knack for the underdog characters. The guys that never got the girl. The counterpart to the charming Ferris Bueller was Cameron Fry. He was Jack Nicholson before “As Good As It Gets.” The original Monk. Of course twenty years later, that character would be hopped up on so much antidepressant and anxiety medicine, we would seize to see his charm and character at all.
It is the era of Ferris Bueller the first minute he is on the screen. He was the audacity of hope twenty years before Obama. Everyone loved him. He was brilliant as he hacked into the attendance computer.
“I asked for a car. I got a computer. How’s that for being born under a bad sign?”
He could move and adapt under pressure, snatching Abe Froman’s reservation at the restaurant.
"We're going to graduate soon. We'll have the summer. He'll work and I'll work. We'll see each other at night and on the weekends. Then he'll go to one school
and I'll go to another. Basically that will be it."
This is maybe the most insightful yet underrated line of dialogue in the film. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” is the only film dealing with the twilight of high school life, accepting the end of the road and relishing the final moment. Ferris has the foresight to see his time with Cameron as the golden age that is about to be over. I didn’t even find depth in this monologue until I was 28 years old.
When you’re in high school, you are certain you are going to hang onto these friends of yours. You’ll never forget them as it is inscribed in yearbooks everywhere. The problem is life gets in the way. You go to college, get new friends. You see people at Christmas break. Facebook has the ability to salvage a lot of friendships that would otherwise be on life support. You get out of college and you get into work mode. You see friends a little bit less. Then you get married and you have to get a kitchen pass to leave the house. When you get married, you get the girl plus her extended family. Your time is getting strapped. Then when you have kids, forget about it. You are booked.
John Hughes died of a heart attack this year, the one man who could bring Ferris back for a sequel or dream up a character that rivaled him. That door has closed. Matthew Broderick never landed a part as a leading man as great as Ferris Bueller. None of us became Ferris Bueller. No one has written a charismatic character to rival it. The ideal of Ferris Bueller may never come again, but it lives forever onscreen.
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