Breaking Away
Review by Paul Preston
Welcome to Today I Watched…, a series of posts documenting my new challenge – watch a movie a day for the rest of my life. Keep coming back to TheMovieGuys.net to find out what I watch each day…and get my take on it.
When I see a movie that’s a new release in theaters or for home viewing, I’ll give it a proper review in the “Reviews”, otherwise, I’ll write about it here.
April 3, 2017 – Breaking Away
This 1979 crowd-pleaser has always escaped my eyes until now. I wanted to catch up with almost four decades ago, so I pulled it up on VOD, figuring I was en route to a sports adventure of some kind (knew there was going to be cycling). But I was not prepared for just how wacky (at times GOOFY) this movie was.
This might be the first “coming-of-age” movie. It may have defined the genre. American Graffiti before it dealt with a similar age group, but no one really learned anything or attempted to better themselves. It’s all right there in the cyclist-distancing-himself-from-the-crowd title – four young townies shiftlessly ramble around Bloomington, Indiana, hoping their next move is the one to help them break away from their hometown. Dave is dead-set on being a championship bicyclist, and hopefully for the Italian team while the others have goals varying from marriage to college.
Here are some of the goofier things in this film – Dave pretends to be Italian to try and woo a girl, Daniel Stern’s character gets his fingers stuck in a bowling ball and it becomes an important plot point, and the craziest thing is that the townies (known as “cutters”) are always fighting the Indiana University students, so the college dean lays down a plan to settle things – a cycling contest! This is the ‘70s version of settling things out on the dance floor or in a rap battle.
As nuts as that set-up is, by the end of the movie, you’re in a sports film and if there’s one thing that can be said about sports films, it’s that I LOVE THEM. Despite parts of the movie being awkward, the finale drove home the big heart at the center of the movie. Paul Dooley plays Dave’s father, so used to failure, it’s so ingrained in him, that the culture of losing and giving up becomes a prison. Dooley gets laughs, but his realization that he can’t pass that culture on to his son is what the movie is all about.
Directed by: Peter Yates
Release Date: July 20, 1979
Run Time: 101 Minutes
Country: USA
Rated: PG
Distributor: 20th Century Fox
