Brats

While Andrew McCarthy's documentary about the lasting effects on the lives and careers of the young actors branded with “The Brat Pack” label is not a good movie by any fathomable measurement, it is an illuminating commentary on an era. But the movie has far less to say about the decade in which the mildly derogatory term was coined than it does about our current cultural times. Unfortunately, the last thing we need is yet another intentional or unintentional exploration into the fragility of our current Zeitgeist, so this annoying, repetitive picture offers few fresh insights.

Brats is one of those personal docs that barely has enough content for a 24-minute short, so the first-time documentarian pads it out with the behind-the-scenes story of his "journey in making the film." In this case, that journey involved calling up a bunch of people and going over to their houses to interview them—very cinematic stuff! Even though it might be interesting for some viewers to learn that McCarthy hasn't seen most of his co-stars from St. Elmo's Fire or Pretty in Pink in more than three decades, this is hardly material worthy of inclusion in the film, let alone for it to make up so much of the documentary's running time.

For those who don't know, the term "The Brat Pack" was a spin on "The Rat Pack," a nickname first coined by Lauren Bacall as a sarcastically pejorative term to describe her and her husband Humphrey Bogart's show-biz drinkin' buddies like Frank Sinatra, David Niven, Michael and Gloria Romanoff, Switfy Lazar, Judy Garland, and Sid Luft. In her autobiography, Bacall states that "in order to qualify, one had to be addicted to non-conformity: staying up late, drinking, laughing, and not caring what anyone thought or said about of us." The honorary moniker was later transferred to describe Sinatra and his crew of Vegas performer pals, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford. The term "Brat Pack" was coined in the 1985 New York Magazine story, "Hollywood's Brat Pack," written by journalist David Blum. Blum was writing a piece for the Magazine on Emilio Estevez as the young Hollywood scion was shooting his debut as a writer/director, Wisdom, which starred himself and his finance, Demi Moore. But when Estevez invited Blum to join him and a bunch of other young Hollywood elites for a night of hanging out, drinking, and carousing at The Hard Rock Cafe, the writer changed the focus of his article to one that played up the privileged, partying lifestyles he assumed all these rich and famous youngsters engaged in together all the time.

While many of the people Blum wrote about in the article didn't actually hang out with each other at all, the main fallout from the piece was that those who were close felt they had to distance themselves from the others they'd been lumped together with in order to be taken seriously. Blum's article was certainly mean-spirited, but the group's collective reaction was a bit drastic. Unfortunately, separating socially from each other and taking on solo projects didn't really help the careers of many folks mentioned in the article. Good parts may not have come their way, but to assume that there was an unlimited number of great roles out there for these pretty actors until they were branded with the Brat Pack label is beyond naive. McCarthy, who wasn't invited to the Hard Rock Cafe that night and is only mentioned briefly in the article, seems to have been the most wounded by Blum's words. He truly feels his career was permanently damaged by this "hit piece."

I should state that I've known a few folks who have worked with Andrew McCarthy as both an actor and a director, and I've heard nothing but glowing things about him as a warm, open, talented guy with a terrific sense of humor, a great deal of humility, and a good attitude about show business. So it's all the more disappointing to see how he portrays himself in this shoddily-made home-movie-doc in which he reconnects with most of his fellow Brat Packers and eventually confronts David Blum in an anti-climatic sitdown that should have negated the whole project.

McCarthy's crew shoots these interviews with four to six cameras, one seemingly Super 8 and one VHS—or maybe that's all done in post with filters. Regardless, the movie looks like dogshit, and, of course, McCarthy leaves in some of the moments when his subjects ask him why he's shooting his film this way—So meta! He also sits down with two of the most pompous social analysts of his generation, Malcolm Gladwell and Bret Easton Ellis (both 60 years old like McCarthy), to get their take on what "The Brat Pack" meant. Though their interviews are shot in the same loose, conversational style as everyone else, the two intellectual blowhards, along with Pretty in Pink producer Lauren Shuler Donner, provide the most interesting perspectives. Perhaps because they're outsiders who are used to being interviewed for their opinions, Gladwell and Ellis provide meaningful context and perspective. The same can not be said of all the actors who agreed to go on record for this film, who each have basically the same viewpoint; they've moved past the "trauma" of being included as part of The Brat Pack. Interestingly, Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, and Judd Nelson, three of the five stars of the undisputed best movie of this loose confederacy, The Breakfast Club, wisely declined participation in this film. It's not that any of the other actors—Estevez, Moore, Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, Lea Thompson, Jon Cryer, and quazi-Brat-Pack-Godfather Timothy Hutton—come off badly; they just don't add much to the proceedings beyond their presence and the respect they show for McCarthy's feelings.

What the celebrity documentarian discovers is that he seems to be the only one in his peer group who feels such lasting resentment about the article and the term. Even those who shared his feelings at the time, Estevez and Sheedy, have moved on and now seem to have no regrets. Those whose careers skyrocketed regardless of the "damage" caused by the article, like Lowe and Moore—who each weathered scandals that actually could& have caused serious career damage, view the article as just par for the course when you're famous and cross paths with a journalist trying to make a name for themselves, or they consider it an honor to have been (and continue to be) lumped together under the harmlessly disparaging umbrella term for a bunch of impossibly good-looking, relatively talented young actors who all made the big a time fast when youth movies were all the rage.

The film is meant to explore the collateral damage caused by the article, but since there really was none outside of the minds of a couple of insecure young actors, and since the film is so unfocused that it is difficult to pay attention to, I found myself reading it as a kind of unintended exegesis on contemporary victim culture and identity grouping. We live in an era when it seems everyone wants to identify as a victim, even one of the most attractive, successful movie stars of his generation. But the interesting thing about the Brat Pack continuum&mdash, both the actors who were mostly born at the tail end of the Boomer generation and the Gen-Xers like me who grew up watching their films, is that we're all from generations made up of primary people who disliked labels. We grew up in highly conformist times, but perhaps because of that, we valued individuality. This love of the individual often expresses itself in obnoxious ways, such as taking strong offense at being labeled as part of a group by a journalist or cultural commentator (something that invariably happens to everyone who becomes successful at some point). But McCarthy now seems to want to voluntarily label himself and his fellow class of actors as involuntarily victims of the Brat Pack label. The folks he interviews seem sympathetic to him, but they can't fully join him in his arrested state of resentment. For better or for worse (and, in case you can't tell, I think it's 100% for the better), the other actors remain individuals, and they can't fully go along with McCarthy's premise.