Review of Breaking Away (1979) by Matt K — 13 Jun 2009

Breaking Away is a coming of age story that has a little something for everyone. There's a sports story in there that figures big in the big bicycle relay climax. The central characters are Dave (Dennis Christopher), the cyclist who has been winning many local races, and his parents. Almost as prominent are Dave's three friends played by Dennis Qualid, Daniel Stern, and Jackie Earle Haley. Each of these guys has their own tiny bit of character development and subplot (though Stern's character Cyril's is almost nonexistant, since it seems that he has no family left in town). The guys have been out of high school for a year, but have not gone to college or gotten jobs. They're sort of like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, but set in the mid-west in a blue-collar college town- Bloomington, Indiana. Besides Dave, they are most fun to watch when they are all together. They drive around Bloomington and the countryside looking for leisure and butting heads with the college students. None of them are sure what is next for them in life. They just assume it is their lot in life to be bums, hanging out with each other. After a while things change for at least two of the characters, and they start to make changes towards adulthood. There is romance as well. Dave falls in love with a college girl he meets while riding through campus. Since he is stuck in his rather amusing Italian culture obsession she guesses that he is an foreigh student, and he just runs with it, putting on an act. Haley's character, Moocher, is a bit further along in his love life, considering marriage with his girlfriend. Dennis Quaid is the more volatile one in the group who gets easily offended by the college kids when they infringe on their turf or crack jokes at the townies, known as "cutters.".

The annual 4-man bike race, which had previously been open only to university teams, invites a team of locals for the first time. Well, you know who will be on thihs team! It is a bit unbelievable that the team that represents the town would be made up of one good cyclist and three non-cyclists. I suspect that there may have been more explanation to how they qualified in the original script. Perhaps it sounded to contrived or unbelievable so it got cut out. It's things like that that makes the film less than perfect. In taking a step back, Braking Away is missing some transitional elements that other films in the genre might have, but I can't quite put my finger on what that is (a training montage, perhaps, or more exposition?) The lead-up to the ending race seemed just a little rushed to me. My favorite elements in the movie were probably the humor that came from the interaction between Dave and his parents, and the musical score that incorporated wonderful Italian music, from Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony and a Rossini opera.

Paul Dooley did a wonderful job as Dave's father, a proud former stone cutter who owns a used-car sales lot. He worries about his son's Italian-act weirdness and lack of true career goals for his life. It is a great story about parents who want their children to grow up to be good adults, and end up doing something better. I liked the exchange between the two parents when the mother says to the father that being a used car salesman was good enough for him, why shouldn't Dave try working there too. The father says, "Damn right it's good enough for me,.

But I don't need any help. He'd ruin me if I hired him, a weirdo kid like that." And then in the next scene we see that his wife must have talked him into it, because Dave's working for his father, washing cars. I won't spoil it by telling you how that works out.