“The dream is always the
same.” So begins this most brilliant of coming-of-age stories. Writer-director
Paul Brickman’s tale of a young high school student whose extracurricular
activities lead him into some entrepreneurial ‘risky business,’ is among the
best films of the 1980s. Indeed, alongside Robocop, no film offers such a
stinging satirical jab at the purveyance of American capitalism and the
materialistic attitudes that can dominate the middle classes. This is a film
with such a superb level of dexterity, due to Brickman’s single-minded purpose,
that it manages to stand on it’s feet as many different things, satire,
coming-of-age story and just pure popcorn entertainment, all at the same time. Through
the cinematography, editing and superb score by Tangerine Dream, the film
consistently maintains the quality of a lucid dream (perhaps that of a teenage
fantasy cum American Dream?), showing us the alienation created by conflicting
morals and views. It also features one of the great screen romances in that of
Rebecca De Mornay’s call girl Lana (as the transvestite Jackie would say, “what
every white boy off the lake wants.”) and rich kid Joel Goodson, played by the
mighty Tom Cruise, whose career was rightfully launched to stardom after this
film. The two share an excellent chemistry together in an emotive and complex
relationship. Both are great, but this is Cruise’s film through and through. Only
twenty-one at the time of it’s release, it’s rare to see an actor so young
deliver so fully formed and developed a performance, but Cruise does so
brilliantly. His Joel is at equal lengths somewhat detestable (sometimes you
would love to punch him for being such a douche), hilarious and totally
empathetic. In a role that would be hard for anyone to pull off, Cruise does it
with confidence and gusto, in one of the more intelligent films of the decade.
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