Say Anything may be the most parodied of John Cusack’s teenage angst films from the 80s, but when it comes to deciding which of his films best chronicles the painfully awkward, frustratingly pointless moments of those high school years, none did it a well as Better Off Dead. Cusack doesn’t play the jock or even the nerd, he’s the guy who fell in between the stereotypes, the one who looks at either end of the spectrum and envies it for having some sense of purpose or even a definition. Dwelling in the obscurity of high school anonymity, Better Off Dead journeys tells an absurd story perfectly tailored to Cusack’s sense of humor, a nostalgia film and a wry screwball comedy rolled into one.
It’s the first day of the rest of his life as Lane (Cusack) wakes up to the picture of his girlfriend Beth (Amanda Wyss) tucked under his pillow, and races out the door with his ski-equipment in hand amidst the lectures from his father (David Ogden Stiers) and the flighty cries of his mother (Kim Darby). He arrives just in time for the high-school ski team tryouts with Beth cheering him on, unbeknownst to him that she’s already dumped him for the ski team captain, who keeps him off the team. So begins the emotional spiral of Lane, leading him to suicide with only the platitudes on love from his mom and his obnoxious and peculiar sidekick Charles (Curtis Armstrong) to console him as he trudges between school and a degrading fast food job. Just when things seem utterly bleak, he finds a new friend in the quiet French foreign exchange student Monique (Diane Franklin), desperate to escape the maternally supported romantic advances of teenage boy in her host family. As Lane regains his confidence he decides to give a social life in high school one last try.
Is this Cusack’s best performance ever? No, because for the most part he’s moping about and exasperated. However his ability to play to the script’s level of comedy is spot-on and his interactions with Curtis Armstrong are hysterical. There’s really no summary for Armstrong’s character as Lane’s best friend, save for that he’s there to be unpredictable and do odd things. From a modern film, it’s the kind of quality we’d call quirky and which writers and directors work far too hard to achieve. But from Armstrong in Better Off Dead it couldn’t have gone any other way. Kim Darby’s apologetic mother-figure is so agonizingly Midwestern that you can’t imagine Holland ever getting a better actor for the part. The cast for Better Off Dead really couldn’t be better. It’s not the most well-known comedy to come out of the 80s, but it deserves to be in the upper echelons.
Better Off Dead isn’t a great comedy because of its very basic high school popularity story or even the performance of Cusack, but because of all the odd little tidbits that Writer and Director Savage Steve Holland packed into the margins. As Lane’s life unravels, his father wages war with the paperboy whose arm sends rolled up papers flying through their garage windows every day and who begins to stalk Lane for the money his family owes the kid for services rendered. Lane’s brother cuts out the coupons on the backs, sides, and fronts of every cereal box in the house to send away for those cheap model kits, which he then upgrades into working death rays and rockets. Lane’s mother should stop cooking altogether but can’t seem to stop herself from serving up recipes that she didn’t follow exactly and end up looking like Gak with raisins. Then there’s the two Asian kids, one who learned English by watching the Wide World of Sports and consequently has a Howard Cassel voiceover, who challenge him to street races that usually end poorly for Lane. It’s these and countless other gags (like Vincent Schiavelli’s highly appreciate math teacher) that make Better Off Dead so sublimely odd that it’s incredibly memorable.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
It kind of breaks my heart that there are no extras on the disc because here’s a film that deserves a little bit of retrospective love from Cusack, Armstrong, and Savage Steve Holland. Hearing what they’d have to say about this unconventional comedy 25 years later would be worthwhile.
"Better Off Dead" is on sale August 2, 2011 and is rated PG. Comedy. Written and directed by Savage Steve Holland. Starring Amanda Wyss, Curtis Armstrong, John Corbett, Kim Darby, Diane Franklin.
