St. Elmo's Fire (1985)

written by: Joel Schumacher and Carl Kurlander
starring: Ally Sheedy, Andy McCarthy, Mare Winningham, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, and Judd Nelson

St. Elmo's Fire exists in a funny purgatory-- iconic and remembered, but not remembered fondly or with particular regard. I have the impression that this movie is a classic, but no one seems to like it. It's style is gaudy melodrama, it's characters are almost uniformly unlikable. Yet when I was getting into 80s teen movies during my high school days, I was told over and over that St. Elmo's Fire was a must watch. It's full of actors I like (which is certainly why I was convinced to watch it initially), all of whom are giving perfectly decent-verging-on-good performances. Everyone is good-looking and gorgeously dressed and styled. Large portions of the movie are simply beautiful, lingering close-ups of the actors faces. The scenery is often handsomely shot, richly realized, and occasionally quite pretty. This movie gets a lot of scrap but it's not terrible. So sometimes the script gets a little overblown, the pacing is a little slow, a little bloated, the story is a touch melodramatic, but it's not terrible at all. It's the sort of movie where if you're willing to pick up what it's throwing down, you may even like it.

At fourteen, or whenever, I was not blown away by this movie. It didn't do much for me. I don't think I really understood what it was doing and I couldn't relate to it. I preferred the cotton candy version of 80s teenagedom in Sixteen Candles and Ferris Beuller. This darker take, and one that is set decidedly not in teenagedom, no matter what the mantle of Brat Pack might imply, didn't work for me when I was a teen. As a teen I wanted teen things-- proms and classes and lockers and house parties. I didn't get it. I had never dated, barely loved from afar, never been out in a world that I didn't know how to fit into or succeed in.

Well, I'm twenty-seven now and I think I understand some of those things a little better and can appreciate some of what this movie is doing a little better.

(look how cute Judd Nelson is. It's absurd)

There are aspects of this movie that hold up well, or I have aged to appreciate them. Maybe we met in the middle. The warm banter and weight of history that this friend group carries is wonderful, and some of the scenes of just dialogue play effortlessly and with power. When everyone is together, there's a naturalism to their interactions that are fun and charming and easy to live in. These are friends I wouldn't mind spending a night out with, even if I wouldn't catch all their inside jokes. Some of the more emotionally heightened moments get sweaty and melodramatic, but some of them work really well. A scene where Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson fight over who gets what records after a break up felt particularly real for me. Compared to Demi Moore's dramatic breakdown at the end of the movie, which is maybe... Too Much, a scene like that fight, or the sex scene between Sheedy and Andy McCarthy, where they both laugh through it and simply enjoy each other-- those scenes really are great! These little things... oh gosh, when Mare Winningham and Rob Lowe finally sleep together, and she's been painting her apartment, and her hands still have streaks of purple paint on them as she grips his bare shoulder... my small, detail-oriented heart just fluttered right out of my chest. It's things like that that make a moment feel real. 

(Forgive me if I don't use character names here, because to be honest it took me 2/3rds of the movie to catch Ally Sheedy's character's name at all (Leslie), and that is too long and also you don't care about character names, really, do you?)

Most of the really dramatic dialogue scenes are staged and played simply, which generally helps to offset the somewhat cheesy words. Schumacher lets the camera sit for long takes, a full thirty seconds here or there, letting his actors do their work in glowing close up. Everyone is gorgeous, and he knows it, and he's perfectly happy to just show off his actors. Meanwhile, I was perfectly happy to watch them-- the wobble in Judd Nelson's lip, the pursed tension in Andy McCarthy's eyes, the softness in Rob Lowe as he tries to convince his wife he can do better, be better. All of that is marvelous and that Schumacher gives them the room to have these moments is wonderful!

He's good with actors, I'll say that now, and I believe it. He likes these moments and the patient intimacy of them elevate an otherwise sortof soap-y picture. He gets good performances out of people even when the roles are thinly written, or shallowly drawn. Demi Moore has no right being so good but she manages to handle every glamorous twinkle of laughter and every shaking, tremulous phone call for help, and weave them into one cohesive character. Of the women in the movie, she's given the least time and the least attention, and she still does it. I think that speaks to her ability, and to Schumacher's ability to get those moments out of her and into the movie. 

He also somehow manages to make sweaty saxophone playing... pretty sexy? (weird how saxophones were really sexy for about ten years, huh?)

Just to talk for a second about that Halloween party where Rob Lowe plays the sax... That scene sits at the center of the film as this gorgeous little nugget upon which everything else pivots. It starts glitzy and gauzy and colorful and hedonistic, the colors amped up to eleven, the crowds tightly packed and everyone is laughing and cheering and happy. Rob Lowe wails on that saxophone, and he's genuinely good, and you can see in this one moment he's fulfilled and happy-- and sober and not causing trouble. The rest of his character hinges on this moment:  He's a goof and a goon, a wreck waiting to happen. Despite his friends attempts to get him steady work, he's not cut out for the workaday world. He's an artist on the sax, and it takes him the rest of the movie to realize that's the only thing he should pursue, because it's the only thing he may ever be able to succeed at. He can't be an office worker, he can't be a husband, he can't be a father, he can barely be a good friend. But he can rip on a saxophone. And in this one scene, we can see it. I said aloud, alone in my apartment, tightly wound with agony that this artist wasn't playing sax full time, "Why isn't he just a professional musician!?" I howled, "He's so good!!" He gets there, and I was so desperately happy when he leaves for New York at the end of the movie, and it's all because the film takes a break in the middle to have him play his sax and be good at it, and show that other people think he's good at it too. It's a rollicking good time for everyone until Rob Lowe's wife shows up with a new beau.

Suddenly, the party, which had been crowded but cozy before, becomes chaotic and overwhelming, then becomes dingy, miserable and gray all at once. The shift happens smoothly and effortlessly, a twist and a nudge of coloring and tonality, and there we are. It is so smoothly affected that you barely notice until suddenly you're out on the sidewalk with sweat cooling on your shoulders and an ugly feeling in your gut that everything has just gone sideways on you.

Maybe I'm exaggerating just a touch, but the control Schumacher shows over saturation, clarity, and temperature within a scene is masterful. His ability to shift feeling and tone through how he shoots a room, or how warm the light is, is sincerely impressive. And then, a little further, I could talk for an hour about his uses of red to underscore bad things a-brewing (the first shot of Rob Lowe, bathed in bloody red light outside the hospital; the teddy Judd Nelson buys for Ally Sheedy; the rich pink of Demi Moore's apartment).

But most of the movie remains not red hot but simply warm and cozy-- St. Elmo's Fire is set mostly in D.C. and Georgetown (!!) in the fall, and the street are full of fluttering red and yellow leaves. Everyone wears beautiful wool coats and scarves (my favorite being Judd Nelson's long blue duffel coat). Apartments are cluttered or tidy, but very personal and fully lived in. There is a richness and weight to every locale, a reality sitting heavy on each scene. The spaces, like the people, feel well loved. Speaking of people: objectively, these characters are... pretty bad (except Mare Winningham, a sweet, nice girl), but they love each other, and the movie shows that they love each other and so... I, at least, was able to get on their page and love them too. It would be impossible to like this group of friends if they didn't like each other, and even when things get rough between them there's enough affection to keep things going. I liked them enough (and liked that they liked each other enough) to care what happened to them. 

It should have been harder to pull off, because yeah, these young adults are... crummy. Especially (mostly) the men. Judd Nelson is a selfish pig who cheats on his girlfriend. Rob Lowe, a shit show disaster who cheats on his wife and emotionally manipulates Mare until he learns better (which, thankfully, he eventually does). Andy McCarthy, who I usually love as tightly wound preps, is here playing a sort of semi-bohemian radical, who is in love with his friends girlfriend and then feels that that love is enough to earn him her love. Which like, sorry dude, but she's not into you. She don't owe you shit! And poor Emilio Estevez, my star, is an a real creep to Andie McDowell because he refuses to read her social cues. I feel for him, he's a nice guy, and eventually he drives off into the sunrise, laughing at himself, but for a while he's... a creep and a jerk and who idealizes her and then is mad when she doesn't play into his fantasy of her. Emilio is somewhat underserved by the movie, but he sure does pull off looking tragic in the rain better than most people could. 

The point is, overall, I kinda dug this movie. I liked these people and I liked the semi-stuffy world they inhabit. There is humor and drama and exhaustion and the abyss, and there is love and hope and friendship and climbing fire escapes. It's homey. It's warm. The concept of having a group of friends this close, and this loving, is more or less a fantasy, but it's one that everyone wants to have come true. To have a group of people you cling to and who cling to you, who go to bars together all the time and who eventually go to brunch instead. People to make mistakes with. People to grow up with. Friends to have forever, even if forever isn't as long as you thought it was. People to live on the edge with. That's the dream, and I think the reason St. Elmo's Fire endures, whether it's very good or not, is because of that divine fantasy of friendship. You watch it a movie and it seems possible, and real. St. Elmo's Fire feels a little more real than most. A little more weighty. A little bit more than just a flash in the pan of wonder, two hours hours of time spent on the fringe of a friend group, and then, like the titular illusion, it's gone. It's not real, but it's comforting and friendly, and it feels good to see.

It's St. Elmo's Fire. Electric flashes of light that appear in dark skies out of nowhere. Sailors would guide entire journeys by it, but the joke was on them... there was no fire. There wasn't even a St. Elmo. They made it up. They made it up because they thought they needed it to keep them going when times got tough, just like you're making up all of this. We're all going through this. It's our time at the edge.

Overall:  ★ ★ ★

Schumacherness: ★ ★ ★

(One stray comment-- Andy McCarthy is sortof friends with a prostitute who hangs out on the corner near his apartment, and she is the best character in the movie by a long shot. She has such perspective, and is so patient with Andy's intense bullshit. She rules.)

Up Next: The Lost Boys (1987)