For a certain segment of the population, this is the movie. The movie. One of my older brothers. My high school JV water polo coach. Countless others. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is to them the funniest, most poignant movie of their lives. It’s not mine. But I’m perverse; they’re more normal. Let’s see how much this movie can mean to normal people.
We start with the hero Ferris Bueller who fakes being too sick to go to school. Matthew Broderick, a 23-year-old teenager, plays Ferris in perhaps his best performance. He maintains a balance of self-assurance and bravado mixed with some humility – nothing can ever go wrong for him, but sometimes it’s close. He wants a day off, and he wants it with his best friend Cameron.
It’s not entirely clear why Cameron is his best friend, since apparently everyone at high school, where Ferris is a senior, adores him. Except for Dean of Students Ed Rooney. This is the ninth day this semester that Ferris has been out sick, and Rooney smells a rat. He dedicates his day to catching Ferris in the lie so that he can do something, anything, to derail this kid’s future.
But Ferris is always one step ahead. When he gets his girlfriend out of school with a phony dead grandma, he has an elaborate setup of answering machine messages set up so that when Rooney calls, the story seems to check out. He has his own voice set up on a tape recording to answer when anyone rings the doorbell. All kinds of elaborate systems are in place to keep any adult from figuring out what Ferris is doing.
None of these are remotely plausible, but in watching the film, you don’t even question it. Written and directed by John Hughes, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has an effortless mastery of tone. Every scene hits the mark. And while mostly a comedy, and a consistently funny one at that, the movie has an underlying sense of wistfulness.
Ferris Bueller is delivering the best day possible to get his buddy Cameron out of a funk. But there’s the “end of school everything’s about to change” tone to the proceedings. This might be Ferris’ perfect day, and it might be the last perfect day before he and Cameron and Sloane must go into the adult world, where there will be consequences for their actions.
The film’s entire story is from an adolescent perspective. Ferris acts like a toddler with his parents and is aloof with other adults. They’re obstacles, not people. While Ferris’s parents are present but inconsequential. Cameron’s dad is a looming, never-seen ogre. Ferris forces Cameron to confront that ogre by borrowing, for the day’s excursion, the true love of the man’s life: a Ferrari. It’s another aspect of the adolescent perspective. Loving a car more than your son is a perversion of adulthood, and Cameron (rather accidentally) directly confronts his absent father, thanks to Ferris’s insistence they take the car out on their day off.
There’s very little plot to the film. It serves as a love letter to ’80s Chicago, highlighting the city’s museums, restaurants, and a Cubs game. The day climaxes when Ferris manages to get a parade float, and lip syncs to not one, but two complete songs. At first the parade officials are baffled, but that Ferris Bueller charm is irresistible. They start dancing along. Ferris is hardly a human being at this point, but more like some kind of trickster god. His schemes should be too crazy or elaborate to work, but he keeps getting away with it by the skin of his teeth.
What adds to the texture of the film is how the characters all go through their own little journeys. Ferris’ sister is consumed with jealousy. Cameron is despondent. Rooney is consumed with spite. And they all are confronted with themselves in relation to Ferris. Sloane… doesn’t really do much but Ioan Skye is almost unconscionably beautiful in this role.
The film looks beautiful, too, shot in a smooth, mostly unflashy style. This new 4K release has been newly restored and has an excellent, cinematic look to it. There’s none of the overly enhanced plasticky appearance that marred the previous 4K release of Hughes’ Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.
Its own episodic nature and generosity with its characters helps make Ferris Bueller’s Day Off easy repeat viewing. Even the fourth wall breaking that Ferris does, talking to the audience, which is so easy to be cloying and irritating, is all part of the film’s charm. What I think makes it transcendent for some is a sense of generational confidence. This is a movie about Gen Xers taking their place, made by a Boomer who was with them in spirit. Their absent or ineffectual adults wouldn’t stop them from coming to their own. As an aspirational, upbeat movie about growing up, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is some kind of perfect.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has been released on 4K UHD by Paramount Pictures, in a regular and Steelbook edition. Note that while both editions include a digital code, they do not have a Blu-ray with the film, just the UHD disc. Extras include a commentary by John Hughes (the only commentary he ever recorded). It also includes archival extras “Getting the Class Together: The Cast of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (28 min); “The Making of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (16 min); “Who is Ferris Bueller?” (9 min); “The World According to Ben Stein” (11 min); and “Vintage Ferris Bueller: The Lost Tapes” (10 min).
