Not your ordinary high school reunion
The Brat Pack dissect how label affected their careers in new doco,writes Ty Burr
You know that one guy at the high school reunion who just won’t go home? Who’s still sitting there at the table under the tent at 1am hashing out old dramas and resentments? That’s Andrew Mccarthy in Brats ,a documentary he wrote and directed in which the actor rounds up his co-stars from 1980s teen movies to ask them if they were as upset as he was — is — about the Brat Pack label. And if not, well, why not?
The movie is a strange but worthy watch. Mccarthy, now 61, is a slightly more wizened and concentrated version of his teenage self, his pale blue eyes still searching for reassurance. The cameras follow him with at times uncomfortable frankness as he dials up Emilio Estevez and Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson, Rob Lowe and Jon Cryer, and asks them if he can come over and chat.
I know many of us think these people all hang out at the same country club, but the truth is Mccarthy hasn’t seen most of them in 30 years.
It goes about as well as can be imagined. We hear that Ringwald would “rather look forward” and won’t be participating, and Nelson proves impossible to geolocate, but Estevez, Lowe, Cryer, Sheedy and Demi Moore welcome Mccarthy into their homes and engage with him on being famous and too young to process it.
What’s really chafing the filmmaker’s biscuits is the June 10, 1985, issue of New York magazine that introduced “the Brat
Pack” — the actors, the phrase, the cultural meme — to a world that wholeheartedly adopted it and, in Mccarthy’s view (and he’s not alone), diminished the individual talents and career options of every actor involved.
“I suddenly felt that I wasn’t being seen,” he says of auditions in the immediate postPretty in Pink era.
His former co-stars have adjusted better, and the conversations range from the therapeutic to sharp cultural analysis about why the Brat Pack happened and mattered.
Estevez acknowledges that the phrase — journalist David Blum’s riff on the “Rat Pack” of Frank Sinatra’s Vegas era — “made us seem like lightweights” but also advises Mccarthy a label has only as much power as one is willing to give it.
Sheedy recalls how her Breakfast Club character allowed her to come to terms with her own lonely adolescence but admits to feeling a “weird vibe” in auditions after the New York magazine article ran.
Lea Thompson points out that the new medium of VHS let teenagers watch movies like Some Kind of Wonderful and
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off over and over, giving them and their stars immense cultural power. Lowe is his unflappable self — “I get why it happened; there were just too many of us,” he says.
And Moore, bless her, is that one friend who keeps talking sensibly and empathetically with Mccarthy until she’s talked him off the ledge. For a while.
The director also buttonholes Pretty in Pink director (and Thompson’s husband) Howard Deutch, St Elmo’s Fire producer Lauren Shuler Donner, novelist Bret Easton Ellis, a film critic, a screenwriter, a casting agent, the author of a book on the Brat
Pack and others, and he layers in a wealth of 1980s interview footage of the actors gamely trying to talk their way out of the corner into which the era painted them. It makes for intriguing if scattershot viewing, and when author and cultural critic
Malcolm Gladwell tells Mccarthy that he was always on Team Ducky you kind of feel the actor has it coming. And Gladwell’s point holds: The Brat Pack movies are still a rite of passage because they let young viewers identify with aspects of the characters in a way that helps them make sense of who they’re becoming.
Still, Brats may not land the way its maker thinks, if only because people tend to not have a lot of sympathy for the complaints of perceived celebrities.
The Brat Pack remains a surprisingly rich cultural concept — Would Friends exist without it? But it eroded at least one actor’s sense of self in a way that’s still eating at him four decades on.