It's easy to underestimate a filmmaker like John Hughes. Like many directors of the 1980's, he found scores of fans in the target group of youth audiences, pushing him away from any substantial contemporary appreciation from high-minded critics. But his films lacked the mythic resonance that made the output of men like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg so timeless, sitting squarely as they did in the present day of yuppie parents and vodoo economics. Indeed, his films sometimes fall into the unlucky trap of nostalgia-fetish because of how well they capture the spirit of their time, even if only from the perspective of suburban adolescence. Just as much as Michael Mann, the zeitgeist of 80's cinema and the pop-culture that followed was indelibly shaped by John Hughes, and there's no better place to find the measure of his creative talent than in the Art Institute of Chicago sequence from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Unlike most of his modern classics, the majority of Hughe's focus in this 1986 film isn't in teenage angst, but instead its opposite. As the title-character, faking sick to skip school for a day on the town, Matthew Broderick is the picture of easy calm, knowing self-confidence and cool wit. He's effectively the high school equivalent of James Bond-- boys want to be him and girls want to be with him-- a figure of pure adolescent wish-fulfillment that helps draw our attention and sympathy to his best-friend, Cameron Frye. As shy, self-loathing and cynical as Bueller is not, Alan Ruck's Cameron is a far more intimate and humane depiction of a lonely teen than the beautiful misfits of Sixteen Candles or the Sartrean archetypes of The Breakfast Club. By putting him to the side as a foil, Hughes is able to flesh out Ruck's character of an awkward teen in ways that might not have been possible with the protagonist's job of standing in center stage.
Throughout the rest of the film, the director humanizes Cameron, Ferris and the rest of his characters the way he does throughout all his works-- as a writer, penning snappy dialogue that's never too sophisticated enough to come from the mouths of teenagers. But in this scene, he drops the typewriter and instead picks up the camera, giving us two minutes of film that are as effective in characterization as they are wordless. Hughes had a sharp eye for composition and color throughout his entire career, but it's most evident in this film where he shows off his pictorial skill with the 2:35.1 frame with classics of modern artwork and their spare environment. Almost everything is accomplished by image here-- the angles of shots, the choice of paintings, the body language of actors. Only the score remains as a non-visual component, but even there Hughes' touch is subtle, with the Dream Factory's instrumental cover of the Smiths' "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" in lieu of a sung version. As such, the sequence plays like an 80's rendition of silent-film technique-- synth-rich chamber music harmonizes with spare, crisp visuals and straight, economic editing to create a snapshot of adolescence that's as funny, beautiful and haunting as anything from J.D. Salinger or Francois Truffaut.
Save for his flair with dialogue, it shows off all the talent that John Hughes had as a moviemaker, a talent that sadly began to fading into the distance of memory short after the completion of this film. Following Ferris Bueller, Hughes tried to move on from the formula of his teen-films into the broader territory of adult comedy with minor successes like Planes, Trains and Automobiles and She's Having a Baby. By the 90's, he'd more or less reinvented himself as a writer-producer of family fare like the Beethoven and Home Alone series, receding more and more into the background of film production. Like Lucas and Mann, he enjoyed a fruitful career both behind the camera and behind directors as well, spurring directors like Howard Deutch and Chris Columbus to helm his scripts for him. Still, even between the limp hits and near-misses like 1991's "Dutch", it always seemed as though Hughes might've had it in him to return to the big screen with the same quality as he had more than twenty years ago.
Sadly, that will never happen now, and instead of a comeback he deserved, the best we can do is offer up a rediscovery. I can think of no better starting point for that, or for remembrance, than this sweet and sad two minutes of film. Rest in peace.
