Say Anything ... (1989)

The real world ... as it should be

[a review written in 2002; today is the 19th anniversary of the film's first showing in Australia—a full fourteen months after its US release]

Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl again; everyone finds themselves. It's pretty hard to beat that for a plot, and Say Anything ... doesn't try. What it does try is the novel approach of putting real people into a teenage romantic comedy. They are fictional, of course, and as all convention dictates, they come from different worlds. But even before the opening credits are done, it's clear that these characters will be different. For Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Cameron Crowe took “typical” high school students and listened to them, as if they were real; for Say Anything, his directorial debut, he imagines two extraordinary young people, their friends and families, as if he had known them all their lives.

Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack), our hero, is one of the great teenage roles. Slightly older and more experienced than his peers (he's spent a year in Germany, where his parents are stationed with the Army), trustworthy, charismatic and mildly under-achieving, he is the kind of guy who is almost universally liked and respected, even if the career counsellor despairs of him. His great passions are kickboxing (“the sport of the future”) and the class valedictorian Diane Court (Ione Skye), whom he's never formally met. As the film opens we discover Lloyd planning for graduation with his best friends, Corey and D.C. (Lili Taylor and Amy Brooks), who warn him that his crush on Diane is hopeless, and that he's only going to get hurt. “But I want to get hurt,” he declares: and sure enough, he will be.

Diane is heading for trouble of a different kind. We meet her in the act of accepting some bad advice from her father on her graduation speech, and trying to shake off the feeling that something is wrong, or at least missing, in her life. Her problem is that she's in a class of her own, something which is stressed by the school principal in a tactless beat-up that will be wince-inducingly familiar to resident brains everywhere. Diane recovers from all of this by tossing the script and wrapping her speech with a moment of pure class; and then she makes the most momentous decision of her life. Lloyd has gathered the nerve to call her up, inviting her to the end-of-year party that evening, and he fast-talks her with such nervous charm that she accepts.

She almost immediately concludes that she's made a mistake. But Lloyd grows on her through the evening, and the party grows on her too: it helps that it looks like a great party. Everyone is genuinely pleased that she's come, and the affection moves her. Diane has never realised how well-liked she is, and there's a general sense of untapped possibility about her: these scenes are like watching a flower open, and if that sounds like a sexual metaphor, then of course it is. It's pretty clear what Lloyd sees in Diane, while it takes Diane the course of the film to understand what she sees, and needs, in Lloyd. This is both something more, and something more personal, than is seen by his female friends ... but more of this anon.

Although nominally the remarkable one—she has beaten out the entire American graduating class to win a scholarship to study in England—Diane is the more thinly written character; and Ione Skye is the weaker actor. This twin shortfall unbalances the movie, and constitutes its main weakness. But this is an unfair criticism in a way, as Lloyd Dobler is an exceptionally vivid part, and John Cusack's conviction and charisma would have made a star out of an unknown, which of course he was not. Skye will always take second billing, but she is just fine as Diane, and there are some terrific line-readings in amongst the odd awkward moments. She has a lot to live up to: as well as playing opposite Cusack, she must portray a character described by Corey and D.C. as “a brain ... trapped in the body of a game-show hostess”. She is beautiful, in the way that real, beautiful 18-year-old girls are: you can see what all the fuss is about, but it's not enough to rescue her when she's dressed in unflattering clothes; and she looks just awful when she's been crying. The camera does not try to varnish any of this, and it makes it all the more impressive when Diane lights up and shines.

(Skye is one of those minor actors who, after a couple of standout roles, seem to have disappeared from sight. She gave an eye-popping, heart-rending performance as Trudi, the promiscuous elder sister in Gas Food Lodging (1992); since then, her only role to register on radar was in the misbegotten Dream for an Insomniac (1998). A Cusack she is not, and the figure that Taylor and Brooks praised is currently as fashionable as their hairstyles, but does she really deserve this oblivion?)

Diane is supposed to be super-bright, and while this doesn't quite come across, you believe her for a clever and articulate girl. What does come across is how unaffected she is. Her brilliance has had an impact on her life, of course, creating opportunities just as it's cut her off from her classmates, and she's both aware and regretful about this. But she dwells on her mind as little as she thinks about her beauty, and it's this innocence—and her capacity for honesty and trust—that define her role in the action.

Lloyd sees this quality more clearly than Diane's father does, and rather than seeking to exploit her innocence, he wants to protect and enjoy it. This sets up a fundamental conflict between the two men: more fundamental than if they were fighting over Diane's “virtue”. (The couple's sexual relationship is not actually an issue in itself, although it marks the point at which the stakes are raised.) Lloyd is trying to win, and Mr Court trying to keep, Diane's heart, but they are also fighting over two ideas of her best interest ... it's a fight that will be won, in the end, by the better man. For all that, the conflict is not absolute. Lloyd has a wary admiration for the father/daughter bond, and Mr Court in turn is pleasantly surprised by Lloyd. You even see satisfaction on his face, at his daughter's happiness in the relationship. But it's this same concern for her well-being that drives him to separate the young couple: he has all sense and experience on his side, and both Diane and Lloyd know it.

John Mahoney, as James Court, is the film's trump card. Say Anything must be the only teen romance where a parent is characterised with as much care as the teens, and Mahoney caps this with a sensitive interpretation of the role. One expects a screen father to be summed up in a few words, all capitalised—here they would be Doting, Ambitious, Protective—but Mr Court, while driven, has a genuine warmth about him and a surprising sense of fun. He is, as a parent of a Diane Court should be, an original. The official line is that Diane can “say anything” to her father: that he's her best friend. This seems too good to be true, and of course it is ... although having watched Almost Famous (2000), you can see how Crowe might conceive of a parent like this, for a child like Diane. While he is formally the bad guy of the plot, Mr Court becomes a real object of pity, and all without any sudden change in his personality, or the director's sympathy for him.

Sympathy is Crowe's great gift, but it's a kind of weakness as well. He has rightly been criticised for the lack of darkness in his films, and there's clearly no question of them holding up a mirror to all of life. Yet with Lloyd, at least, there's an element of mystery: we have no idea of his relationship with his (absent) parents; his aimlessness hints at trouble ahead. And there's something between confusion and anger that underlies his riffs in conversation, which Crowe and Cusack are wise enough to merely suggest—it's never discussed. It would also seem to undergird his awe of Diane, who is more at peace with herself. When the couple split Lloyd is all at sea, swinging between shattered grief and self-conscious poses of defiance. Whereas Diane, while miserable, still has her prospects and her father ... or so she thinks.

On top of the leading roles, and the famous boom-box sequence, Say Anything offers many small pleasures: the late Kim Walker's “finger quotes”; Joan Cusack's uncredited cameo as Lloyd's big sister Constance; a soundtrack reflecting Crowe's unashamed and discerning taste in pop. And the details are a delight, if sometimes a painful one. Embarrassment is an important part of the comedy, and the embarrassing moments in this film are all the more awful because they're ordinary, and kind of arbitrary: they feel real. The 63 songs that Corey has written about Joe, the guy who's been playing with her head, are all too plausible; and The Pen, familiar to anyone who's seen the film, is something you just wouldn't make up, although one assumes that it's Crowe's invention. He generally has the courage to invent things that others would not, such as the fact that Lloyd's best friends are both girls ... there's even an un-named girl who occupies a circle slightly further out, which is just right. I have no idea how Crowe manages this: ask me how the girl-buddydom sits with Lloyd's taste for kickboxing, and I'm sure I can't tell you, but it works just the same. The characters in Say Anything have flavour, and the difference between this and (say) a John Hughes film is like the difference between a meal and fast food, or between the particular and the generic. Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall) is The Smart Kid in The Breakfast Club (1985)—see, you hadn't remembered the character's name, had you—and everyone is supposed to “recognise” him. Diane Court is a smart girl whom you don't recognise, only because you never happen to have met.

Even the sexual psychology of the characters is plausibly off-beat. While no-one in the film draws attention to it, or even seems to notice, with a father like James Court it's clear how a girl might settle for a lover like Lloyd Dobler. This doesn't conform to the current taste for female empowerment ... but note that while the lovers are traditional masculine and feminine types, their roles have been completely reversed: Diane is the smart one, on whom location, career and money will depend; Lloyd is the nurturing one, the unfailing personal support on whom the couple's true happiness will rest. There is not a hint of gender anxiety here—okay, so Crowe's an optimist—but just think how much more radical this is than the vogue for chicks who kick ass, be they mystically enhanced (Gellar), genetically enhanced (Alba), generally improbable (Jovovich) or just plain astonishing (Rodriguez). With the abundance of clever girls, and the shortage of slim-waisted things who can demolish men twice their bodyweight, one wonders why we see quite so many fight scenes, and so few female breadwinners. Or, one might wonder, if the answer were not so obvious. Female empowerment might be in, but pandering to mainstream fantasies is compulsory.

Lloyd and Diane are a fantasy of a different kind, one that might actually happen. Revolutionary as this is, part of the charm of the film is that no wider point is being made: there is no message that a successful woman needs a supportive man behind her. The message is that Diane Court needs Lloyd Dobler, and by film's end she has him. Along with Diane's father you might fear for them, and wonder if this can work: if someone like Lloyd can follow his girl wherever she needs to go, and truly find his happiness in securing hers. One senses real risk for the couple after the final reel—unusual in romantic comedy—and Crowe's final act of brilliance is to have them acknowledge it. The effect, of course, is only to deepen the romance, and to crown this remarkable, original film with one of the most perfect endings you will ever see.

[Check the film and the director on IMDB. If you don't care about serious spoilers, Roger Ebert has reviewed the film twice: for the 1989 release, and in 2002.]