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When Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewed “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” for their TV show in 1986, the two inestimable Chicago film critics gave John Hughes’s pièce de résistance one thumb up (Ebert) and one thumb down (Siskel). For a movie that became both a cultural touchstone and lightning rod, their disagreements skewed basic; Roger thought it was fun and funny and Gene did not. There is, however, a revealing moment when they show a clip of the scene in which the eponymous high school senior (Matthew Broderick) laments having to take a test on European Socialism: “I’m not European, I don’t plan on being European, so who gives a crap if they’re socialists? They could be fascist anarchists, it still doesn’t change the fact that I don’t own a car.” Off camera and under his breath, Siskel mutters, “So much for the history of man.” He was 40 when the movie was released, just entering middle age, and though I chuckled at his line, it also struck me as blinkered. “Movies do not change,” his counterpart once noted, “their viewers do.” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” might have been fantastical, but his European Socialism line rang remarkably true from the point-of-view of so many teens and pre-teens like me who hated school. (I support public education and public schools. I contain multitudes.) Indeed, once Ferris has convinced his parents (Lyman Ward and Cindy Pickett) that he’s sick, he sits up in bed and confesses his lie by breaking the fourth wall. In 1986 this blew my eight-going-on-nine-year-old mind. He was making me his accomplice, taking me under his wing, and inviting me into his subsequent adventure as he moves heaven and earth to round up his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) and best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) to take a day off from school by leaving suburbia via Cameron’s dad’s 1961 red Ferrari GT for sunny downtown Chicago with Edward R. Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), Dean of Students, in hot if comically hapless pursuit.
The following year, “Adventures in Babysitting” would portray downtown Chicago as nothing less than an urban warzone, a far cry from the gleaming metropolis of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” The truth of mid-to-late 80s Chicago likely lay somewhere in the middle, but then, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” was not an in-the-middle kind of movie. Its downtown Chicago was one where the most nefarious character encountered was a snooty maître-d (Jonathan Schmock) and where Ferris could join a parade midstream, sing karaoke, and the whole city would be none the wiser. The trio repeatedly comes close to being caught, though the movie never effuses a true sense of fear or risk, illustrating not only a lack of traditional stakes but how as a character, Ferris is virtually unchanged by the end. Like Ferris, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” is not playing by narrative rules, and while there is something to be said for a movie genuinely wrestling with the high school experience, there as much to be said for one that transcends it. High school is grueling, not just on account of homework and tests but from social anxieties and pressures, something to survive as much as enjoy. Ferris Bueller dared to imagine a world where none of that had to be true, for one day, at least. No wonder everyone considered him a righteous dude.
George Will certainly did. The same year The Wall Street Journal deemed the one-time Pulitzer Prize winner as the most powerful journalist in America, he called “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” “the greatest movie of all time” in The Washington Post. “By ‘greatest movie,’” he explained, “I mean the moviest movie, the one most true to the general spirit of movies, the spirit of effortless escapism.” He makes this argument as only Will could, not merely lauding Hughes’s work but dissing French, Italian, and Scandinavian arthouse movies along the way, complaining that movies have grown too serious by literally writing that “in the 1950s movies became ‘films,’” and firing figurative shots at film critics like the name-checked Pauline Kael for deigning to treat movies seriously in the first place. I wonder what Will makes of his fellow conservative pundit Mark Hemingway’s take that “Ferris Bueller is a celebration of pure individualistic liberty.” Is that too serious or is that just common sense, an eternal verity rather than an ephemeral one, a la Joseph Epstein whom Will cites in opposition to what he predicts a mere two weeks after the movie’s release will be clichéd critiques “(o)f the self-absorption of youth corrupted by the complacency of the Reagan years.” He is not only essentially quoting David Denby’s negative assessment for New York Magazine but a thousand pithy leftist Letterboxd-style putdowns word-for-word, which is not necessarily to say those putdowns are wrong but that they are not in any way new as they no doubt assume themselves to be. Verily, all that was there in the beginning, kidz.
How can you argue with ‘“Life moves pretty fast; if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it’” wondered Bonnie Stiernberg for Paste in 2016. Oh, you can argue, and plenty did and have, as Alan Siegel did in 2011 for The Atlantic, dismissing perhaps the movie’s most famous line as fortune cookie wisdom, the viewpoint of a character for whom the world is a cushy place, ensconced in wealthy suburbia, quite literally evoked in the movie’s first shot, an establishing exterior one of the Bueller home. Stiernberg, in fact, cops to Ferris’s cocoon of privilege even as she deems the story universal. Siegel, on the other hand, suggests it cannot be universal because of the privilege, the inherent classism, and the pointed whiteness of the main story. He links to a piece in The Paris Review by Caleb Crain which is some real Moby-Dick-is-the-Republic-of-Ireland stuff. Crain sees Ferris as “a child of wealth,” which is demonstrably true, everything else flowing from that, building to a concluding paragraph in which the Ferrari convertible becomes the ultimate emblem of capital, spending it rather than investing it, as he writes, destroying it for self-expressive pleasure. I laughed so hard reading this I practically had tears in my eyes.
The best “Ferris Bueller” revisionist argument is no essay; it’s Minhal Baig’s Chicago-set 2023 independent film “We Grown Now.” Told from the perspective of two pre-teen Black boys, Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez), living in the Cabrini-Green project of Chicago circa 1991, their lives are diametrically opposed to Ferris, besot with the threat of violence even if their mother works hard to make their home a serene, inviting place. Mid-movie, they skip school and light out for downtown Chicago via the CTA rather a 1961 Ferrari, visiting the Art Institute where in addition to seeing Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte like Cameron they also see Walter Ellison’s Train Station. In the former, Cameron might have desperately sought to see himself only to see nothing at all, but in the latter, described by the Art Institute as foreground(ing) the harsh realities of racial injustice under Jim Crow in the 1930s,” Malik and Eric are allowed to see themselves. And it suggests that a day off in downtown Chicago belongs just as much to two Black kids from Cabrini-Green as it does to three White kids from Shermer High. Why it even belongs to a pair of garage attendants (Richard Edson and Larry Flash Jenkins), as “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” itself makes clear, when they take the Ferrari for a joyride in lieu of parking it. All these characters’ backgrounds and perspectives may be different, but the experience of the day off itself is universal.
At one point during the parking attendants’ Windy City hot-rodding, Hughes cues up the “Star Wars” theme, a humorous underscoring of this day off’s inherent sense of light-hearted rebellion. That rebellion takes a sober turn in the climax, however, when Cameron rejects his and his family’s wealth and his father’s own rejection of him by sending that pristine Ferrari plunging into the abyss, “like an outtake from ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ dropped into the middle of a Bugs Bunny cartoon,” Matt Zoller Seitz would write for Slant Magazine. “(B)y showing it, Hughes subtly acknowledged that the rest of what he’d shown us was pure escapism—and that by seeking out such entertainment, we were trying to avoid thinking about our own miseries, which might not be identical to Cameron’s in all the details, but were every bit as intense and alienating.” If Cameron momentarily punctures the bubble, it seems as if Ferris’s sister Jeanie (Jennifer Grey) and her parallel subplot is ready to puncture the bubble entirely, on the verge of giving up her brother right at the last minute…until she doesn’t. It’s not only that’s she spurred to self-reflection by a Boy in the Police Station (Charlie Sheen in a career-best performance), but in that final do-or-die moment, she chooses to believe in the fantasy, opting to follow her brother down the path of merrymaking righteousness.
Escapism in movies is not a bad thing. Even Hollywood Special Emissary Emeritus Orson Welles knew the value of escapist cinema. “I think it’s very nice,” he said, “to make movies for the child which is in every grown person.” The truth is, as I get older, the harder it is to remember the movie-watching child within. I stopped caring about “Star Wars” a long time ago. I did not see the new “Masters of the Universe” movie because the first time I watched a He-Man cartoon in adulthood my immediate inclination was to call my dad and profusely apologize for ever having forced him to sit through such dreck. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” has not changed in the last 40 years, I have, and yet, for me, its spirit endures. Ferris often gets yoked to capitalism and individualism, but as I have aged and changed and formed and modified a set of beliefs and values, I see him through the lens of flânerie (he even dresses like a flâneur). The poster memorably decreed that Leisure Rules and in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” he effectively transforms leisure into his own ism, demonstrating how it can enrich, fulfill, inspire, and nourish, that the very meaning of life is to stop and look around once in a while. If you think that message is banal or does not remain worthwhile then I’m willing to bet you’re still too scared to eat pancreas.
