Review of Endless Love (1981) by Augustine H — 02 Jul 2013

The story is about 17-year-old David Axelrod played by Martin Hewitt, some guy whose career went nowhere falls in love with 15-year-old Jade Butterfield played by Brooke Shields. Jade is caught by her dad Hugh played by Don Murray and is forced not to meet David ever again when Hugh realises that Jade has lack of sleeping, is taking sleeping pills and this has affected her grades.

Unable to stay away from her just for 30 days just so that Jade can pass her exams and graduate, one of David's friends jokingly suggests to kidnap her or burn the entire family house down. So he takes option number two and is jailed for a couple of years.

He goes to visit them where they have relocated in Manhattan and a fight breaks out between David and Jade's older brother making David end up in a mental hospital. The film ends with Jade visiting him there.

Based on a novel by the same name by Scott Spencer, I'm glad that the film made a few changes to the source material and here's why: At the end of the book, David is released from the mental hospital and is married to an unnamed woman and Jade is married to someone else during when David was in the mental hospital.

If they had used that ending, I know the movie would have been a lot darker but it would jave just come out as another Romeo and Juliet-type romance-drama. Again I say, I'm glad they made that change otherwise this movie would have changed the title from Endless Love to Ended Love.

We want the title to always match with whatever we're filming or writing and that's why in this case, it works here. The film introduces us to two young actors who eventually grew up and gained a cult following: Tom Cruise who was just under age-20 then and James Spader who had just passed the 20-age mark then.

Cruise having a short cameo was introduced as David's second friend Billy who inspires David to burn the Butterfield family's house down after Billy says he was once appreciated a hero by his parents for setting the house on fire with a pile of newspapers and then putting the fire out.

Spader was introduced with a much larger role as he plays Jade's older brother Keith who first introduces David to Jade and then starts to hate David for burning the house and puts the blame on him for his dad's death.

The film was nominated an Oscar for it's theme song which has the same name but it was hated so badly and was nominated several Razzies; I'm failing to understand why. Endless Love gets a 9.9/10; It's not perfect but it's almost perfect.