If the movie lacks something, it is a sense of the shame and suffering a pregnant high school senior might undergo. Ringwald seems too well-adjusted, too resilient. And yet there is a certain bottom line of honesty in this movie, and if it is about the joy of young love, it is also about the pressures of young responsibility (I hope impressionable teenage viewers will devote careful attention to the scenes where Ringwald is stuck in her walk-up apartment, while her young husband is out with his buddies).
In the film, Ringwald and her boyfriend, Randall Batinkoff, begin to sleep together and almost immediately have to face the pregnancy. In a plot that centers on national holidays, she blurts out the news at Thanksgiving and they decide to get married at Christmas. Both of these decisions are met with varying degrees of horror by their parents - Miriam Flynn, Ringwald’s divorced and bitter mother, and Kenneth Mars and Conchata Ferrell as Batinkoff’s loving, conventional parents.
The movie is perhaps too willing to play Batinkoff’s parents for laughs, and I could have done without a scene of a toppling Christmas tree. But the moments between Ringwald and Batinkoff are well-written and played with a quiet, touching sensitivity; we recognize elements of real life in their relationship.
The movie was written by Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue, whose last collaboration was the wonderful “About Last Night.” That movie, based very loosely on a play by David Mamet, was about swinging singles in their 20s and 30s. This one, an original, has the same feel for plausible dialogue and the same knack for finding scenes that reveal personalities, instead of simply advancing the plot. Consider, for example, the sequence after the birth, when Ringwald suffers from postpartum depression. This is the sort of touching realism you wouldn’t expect from a “teenage movie,” and yet it lends weight and importance to the sequences that follow.
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