The Breakfast Club, 1985

The 1980s have brought us several classic films, such as Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and My Dinner with Andre. It also brought one of the greatest coming-of-age films of all time, The Breakfast Club.

In this review, I will analyze the movie in terms of its theme and plot, as well as character analysis and important scenes.

Plot and themes:

The plot of The Breakfast Club tells the story of five high school teenagers, John Bender, Claire Standish, Andrew Clark, Brian Ralph, and Allison Reynolds, who are in detention on a Saturday. As the story progresses, we get to know and understand the reason why these teenagers are in detention and get to know them more.

The film's main themes is about the pressure that parents put on their children, both physically and mentally from physical parental abuse to mental pressure from the parents' demanding good grades and the importance and pressures of teaching. The film does an excellent job of exploring this theme from the beginning to the very end.

These themes successfully spawn two other themes, the First is social class within the high school grounds, and the second is teachers' behavior towards students who are sent to punishment. Each of these themes is expressed in one or two scenes in the film, and although the number of scenes may not be enough for such themes, The Breakfast Club manages to explore these themes brilliantly in a short number of scenes for each of the spawned themes.

However, some scenes cast some doubts about the motivation of these themes and make it difficult to see what the film is trying to tell us. One of these scenes is when Vernon reads a file about a student, who we assume it's Bender. This scene raises the question of why Vernon is reading a file about Bender. Is he trying to help him or is he trying to punish him?

Another scene is when Claire asks Brian to write an essay that represents their feelings and emotions. Why did Brian write the essay for them? Was Claire and the others using him? Although it is implied that Claire and the others did not have the intention of using Brian, these two scenes shouldn't have caused any doubts about the intentions of the film exploring these themes.

Important scenes:

The Breakfast Club is full of important scenes from start to finish, and all of these scenes are linked to either the main theme or one of the three spawned themes.

One of the important scenes is the very first scene in the film where we are introduced to the teenagers and, most importantly, their parents. This scene starts the main theme of the film as we see the parents of three of the teenagers who are in detention, as one tells Claire Standish, one of the two girls in the film, that going to detention for skipping class to go Shopping is not wrong. We also see another parent, the mother of Brian Ralph, telling her son to find a way to study while in detention, and lastly, we see the father of Andrew Clark telling him to go to detention. While this scene does not explore the main theme directly, it does open the door for it to be explored in detail during the film.

The second important scene takes place in the room which the students are in for detention. This scene continues exploring the main theme as Bender portrays how his parents act and treat him, as his acting shows that his father abuses him physically. This scene also shows how Claire feels about her parents as they are using her to get back at each other. This scene also introduces the first spawned theme, the social class within a high school, as all the students in detention make fun of each other by mentioning features from their club, or title in high school.

The third scene takes place in a closet where the teacher Richard Vernon puts Bender in solitary detention. In this scene, Vernon mocks Bender for being a delinquent and threatens him by beating him and saying that he will forget about the school and that the school will forget him. This scene introduces the second spawned theme, as it shows how teachers, in this case Vernon, treat students who are deemed criminals by the school and are sent to punishment. As we mentioned earlier, there are some doubts about the intention of this theme when is shown when Vernon reads the file about Bender.

Another important scene is when Andrew Clarke asks Allison Reynolds to open up and express her feelings and talk about her problems, in which we learn that she is ignored by her parents. This scene continues exploring the main theme as Allison needs attention from her parents. The fourth important scene takes place in the place Where Vernon is reading Bender's file as Carl the janitor, played by John Kapelos, starts a conversation with Vernon, in which Vernon tells Carl that the students turned their backs on him, which Carl replayed that Vernon that he thought that teaching was an easy job but he faced the reality that it is not as easy as he thought. This scene can be seen as a discussion of the theme and manages to successfully explore it with only a few lines as it shows the importance of teaching and how understanding the students is important.

The next important scene takes place when the students are in detention. Where Andrew explains why he is in detention and says that what he did was for his father as he does not like the week. The scene also tells us what Brian did and why he did it, as his reason is that he couldn't accept getting an F, Which leads us to the reasoning that he can't accept a grade less than an A due to the pressure from his parents. This scene also ends the theme of Social Class as each of the five teenagers might ignore the other when they are in school due to their social class.

The last important scene is the last, where Vernon reads the only essay that was written by Brian, which expresses the students' feelings and how no matter what they wrote Vernon will always think of them how he wants to think of them. They say that each one of them is a brain, an athlete, a princess, a basket, and a criminal.

Character Analyses:

The film portrays the five teenagers as one of each social group in high school. As Andrew Clarke represents the Athlete, Brian Ralph is the brain, Claire Standish is the princess and among the popular group in school, Allison Reynolds is the outcast and the one who does not belong in any group, and John Bender is the criminal and delinquent of the school and who is treated as the one who everyone do not think highly of him.

These characters stick to the way that the film portrays them, but as the film goes on we go deeper into their psyche as we explore their problems we find out that they are the problems that most teenagers face. From parental abuse to being classified by their groups and clubs in school. The actors brilliantly played their parts and the film portrayed the characters wonderfully in a way that not too many films managed to do so.

Final thoughts:

The Breakfast Club has always been a classic film, and it will always be due to the film's story, its characters, and the themes that it discusses. Despite the small flaws in the film that might cause some questions about how to judge some of the characters' actions, The Breakfast Club managed to stay focused on its main theme and, with its excellent cast, managed to deliver one of the greatest coming to age films of all time.

This film is a must watch.