Sixteen Candles (1984)
“Style over substance” gets overused a lot. These aren’t two opposing facets of a film, they are complimentary things that should work in tandem. The substance of a movie should be evoked through its style, in its music and its camerawork and its costuming and its overall sense of feeling, and the style should be a natural extension of the ‘substance’ in the plotting, themes, and characters: in a vapid and morally desolate film like ‘Sixteen Candles’, the ‘style’ seems to win out because it feels like the ‘substance’ just isn’t there. If there’s no scaffolding to hold it up, the style isn’t style at all, just empty iconography.
‘Sixteen Candles’ definitely seems to reflect the upbeat aesthetic of the immortal ’80s teen movie that Hughes would define in his later (and much better) films, a pop-rock soundtrack of youth and visions of a world of fashion long gone to us and lost amongst the film’s mean-spiritedness. It almost seems to capture the true awkwardness of teenage romance, but always feels off the mark, slipping past the authentic and stumbling full-pelt into the realm of creepy, uncomfortable, and outright horrific.
Creepy asshole guys victimise themselves as poor suffering subjects to the whims of adolescence, who condone date-rape and still get the girl anyway. A racism both casual and unsubtle, from a passing joke about black guys in the first few minutes to the bizarre figure of Long Duk Dong, highly uncomfortable and difficult to watch (except for a few brief scenes where he gets smashed and steals the film as a rogue chad). An overarching sexism and meanness to the female cast, particularly Ringwald’s Sam, never feeling like it has any purpose and that it’s just there for an attempt at some unfunny comedy.
It never feels like we learn anything: Sam pines after the hot rich boy, and gets him; Jake, the hot rich boy, gets bored of his girlfriend and picks up Sam, and probably will get bored of her one day too; the Geek just wants to get laid, and does. Nobody changes, they just go through the motions and end up exactly where they were at the start of the film, only with a change of scenery.
That said, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the only scene that makes ‘Sixteen Candles’ worthwhile — the sister getting high as shit on pills at her wedding and clearly having the time of her life. It’s fun, light-hearted, and distinctly missing the feeling of meanness that pervades the rest of the film.
‘Sixteen Candles’ is a sexist, racist piece of shit that should be ignored in favour of the cream of ’80s teen, Hughes’ later ‘The Breakfast Club’ and ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’. If you come here looking for any of those films, you are not going to find it.
★☆☆☆☆
