The Talkies/Breaking Away
Bayles, Martha
THE TALKIES BREAKING AWAY by Martha Bayles Whether or not you have ever been to Bloomington, Indiana, this movie will make you homesick for the place. You'll remember summer afternoons when you...
...it has even won him the affection of Katherine (Robyn Douglass), a luscious sorority girl who thinks he is an exchange student...
...But if you look for a resolution to the tension between playfulness and seriousness in Dave himself, the ending is thoroughly satisfying...
...The hero of the movie, though not the leader of the gang, is Dave (Dennis Christopher) who, being imaginative and ambitious, wants to be a champion bicycle racer...
...his mother, understanding, shrugs...
...With no illusions he takes up the skills he acquired in those innocent days before the Italians flipped him off the road...
...The whole race is wonderfully colorful: All the lollipop, balloon, used-car-lot flag, John Deere, and Adidas colors in the film converge with more than the usual grandstand richness...
...Breaking Away, directed by Peter Yates and written by playwright Steve Tesich, is a movie about adolescence-about four lower-middle-class boys growing up in a Midwestern university town and their run-ins with the slick students who walk around like they own the place...
...Dave and his friends accept, and enter as a team, although he is the only one who can do anything on a bicycle...
...His old imagination rears its fertile head again, and you can tell it's going to cut the same swath through the campus that it cut through the town...
...Probably meant to stoke the rivalry between town and gown, these scenes are heavy-handed...
...When some famous Italian champions come to Indiana to enter a cross-country race, Dave talks his mother into letting him enter it, too...
...Like the rivalry, the victory is a bit trumped-up, with Dave not only riding four times as long as any other contestant, but bleeding from a leg wound as well...
...None of his bones are broken, but peering through the roadside weeds at all those wheels whizzing past, he is deeply hurt and bewildered...
...that principle your parents worry about, reality...
...And if you look for a resolution to the rivalry at the end, you'll find a slight contradiction, an unexpected twist: Dave wins for his buddies and the town, but then goes to college, leaving Mike, Cyril, and Moocher behind...
...Fortunately, they are soon interrupted by fights over Katherine, turf, and who banged whose car, and we forget about analyzing everybody's relation to the means of production...
...He think's he's ready for anything, especially those Italians a mile ahead of everyone else...
...He and his friends Mike (Dennis Quaid), Cyril (Daniel Stern), and Moocher (Jackie Earl Haley) feel resentment toward the students, and they sit around articulating their envy and class consciousness...
...Buon giorno, Pappa,'' he says to his father (Paul Dooley), an overweight used-car salesman...
...It is a crucial moment: that when someone takes up for serious reasons what was acquired for playful ones, and realizes the necessity of both...
...What he's not ready for is what they do to him when he catches up to them: They stick a bicycle pump between his spokes...
...After an excellent brawl at the student cafeteria, the president of the university suggests that the town enter a team in the university's sports event of the year, the Little 500 Bicycle Race, thus shifting the rivalry to healthier ground...
...It's the height of his summer, and his Italian persona is in full flower...
...The dream of being an Italian bicycle racer is Dave's only escape from the reality of being just out of high school, bumming around town without prospects and surrounded by other young people whose lives are all nicely arranged for at least four years...
...His hero-worship requires him to be like them in everything...
...And you'll recall the pleasant burgeoning of fantasies and plans that have nothing to do with Martha Bayles is a novelist living in New York...
...Aspetti un momento, Mamma," he says to his mother (Barbara Barrie), whose blondness and dreaminess he has inherited...
...With classic simplicity, the story of his ambition falls into two parts, innocence and knowledge, with a fall- or more properly a spill-in between...
...In the shadows of a tool shed he Works on repairing a bicycle...
...You'll remember summer afternoons when you and your friends don't want to look for work because nothing to do is plenty, when youth still lords it over idleness...
...His father bellyaches about having a crazy son...
...At first he races his bicycle all over southern Indiana, singing Italian arias, because the Italians are the best bicycle racers in the world...
Vol. 12 • August 1979 • No. 8
