A Move in the Right Direction

WITH INQUISTIVE ADOLESCENTS comprising a substantial percentage of moviegoers these days, it seems only logical--if only from an economic standpoint--that producers literally glutted the screen with "teenage trash films." Occasionally, the script writer will muster up a flimsy plot to legitimize the film's existence. More often the film will do nothing more than what it purports lure sex-hungry teenagers to watch John Travolta and NastassiaKinski sweat and pulsate.

Among the most memorable short-lived "classics" to hit box offices in recent memory are The East American Virgin (lots of bodies, lots of sap), class (lots of Jacqueline Bisset, more sap), and Private Lessons (more of the same, minus Jacqueline Bisset). As long as teenagers continue demand a peek at what lies beyond the locker room producers will continue to churn out such films en masse, with more regard for profits than artistic quality.

Fortunately, with the release of this summer's critical success Risky Business, featuring newly-discovered Tom Cruise, the so-called teenage film industry has shown signs of possible salvation. Though undeniably, Cruise's dancing around in his underwear lured many ogling 15-year-old girls to the cinema, producers seemed to recognize that there was more to appeal to in a teenage film than hormones. Risks Business exhibited promise beyond the usual hackneyed dialogue and childish antics, to which teenage audiences are so accustomed. Its well-developed fantasy motif, more importantly, indicated that producers finally may be getting away from the temptation of marketing flesh for flesh's sake.

Cruise's latest film All the Right Moves--the saga of Stefan Djordjevic's attempt to work his way out of poverty through high-school football--confirms this hope. While All the Right Moves has the potential ingredients of a trash film--the high school setting, the football pep rallies, the steamy sex scenes--it is clearly more than an insipid adolescent anatomy lesson. In fact, because so much of the film deals with larger, more universal themes than the Ampipe High School Bulldogs' unsuccessful attempts to "kick the other team's ass," All the Right Moves has little trouble transcending the bounds of conventional high school prankery.

From the opening shots of the factories and steel mills, the movie clearly sets itself up as a forum for social commentary. The actual football games themselves are less important, the audience discovers, than what they represent to each of the characters. To the players, the sport symbolizes an avenue away from the Pennsylvania steel mills, where their families have worked since the town's origin. To the coach, who doubles as a typing teacher, football offers a means of working his way out of an underfunded, unsupported public school system where few kids get beyond high school. And finally, to the townies, it represents a spirit of camaraderie a means of unifying the unemployed steel workers while simultaneously giving them a sense of self-worth.

Much of the movie succeeds because of director Michael Chapman's willingness to confront seriously the social issues facing his characters. In fact, because he bravely tackles so many issues at once. All the Right Moves often seems more like a series of social statements than the story of an adolescent's struggle to escape the steel mill mentality.

Something in the painful irony of the team captain getting up and leading a pep rally moments after he has found out his girlfriend is pregnant strikes us as tragic. Yet it is precisely this piercing blend of pain and pity that gives the movie its real substance. Time after time we see this combination when Stefan's brother plans to go out and "get shitfaced" to forget his unemployment woes, and again when the coach eggs on his players by telling them "We re nothing more to them [the other team] than Dagos, Polacks, and Spicks." Undoubtedly, the movie's most painful moment occurs when Stefan trades insults with his coach by returning "You're not God, you're just a typing teacher."

THE POIGNANI JUXT APOSITION between the illusion of hope football offers the town and the reality in which they live makes much of All the Right Moves an incisive example of social criticism. When the team captain tells a stadium full of adult fans "We're not doing this just for us, we're doing this for you," it is more than a appeal to their spirits: it is an insightful--and painful--truth.

The movie relies more on the irony of its issues for its triumphs than on the talent of individual actors. In part, this is due to a flawed script that introduces characters like Stefan's brother and then abandons them midway through. While Stefan's father (Charles Cioffi) and his hardnosed coach (Craig T. Nelson) give convincing performances, their development seems subordinated to Cruise's--whose effective blend of toughness and sensibility fails to fully compensate for his playing a role he is physically unsuited for.

The movie has other flaws, as well. Instead of developing issues like the ones posed by Cruise's girlfriend (Lea Thomson)--who attacks the barriers non-athletes encounter in getting beyond jobs at the local grocery store--Chapman repeatedly resorts to less dangerous, more predictable cheap sell tactics. A student's "getting off" in typing class to the amusement of his peers is one of several examples. Because director Chapman seems afraid to go completely beyond one level of sophomoric romance, All the Right Moves never quite reaches its potential.

More importantly, Chapman attempts to make everything work out neatly in the end, and as a result the final scene is highly anti-climactic. Instead of leaving the theatre unsettled and introspective, the audience wonders whether the film is principally a social commentary or an attempt to disguise conventional high school antics beneath a veneer of sincerity.

All the Right Moves founders trying to achieve the right balance between the high school antics of Porky's and the social messages of The Deer Hunter. Whether or not such a compromise can successfully be struck--or if it's even advisable to try--seems questionable. In comparison to its predecessors, though, the film is definitely a move in the right direction.