Andrew McCarthy has been back in the public eye promoting his new documentary Brats (2024). And while there wasn’t much to redeem what amounts to a ninety minute pity party, Brats did peak my interest in some of the lesser known “Brat Pack” movies. Class (1983) is one of those movies.
Class finds McCarthy, Rob Lowe, John Cusack, and Alan Ruck playing spoiled private school boys at an elite all boys school. The plot concerns McCarthy’s affair with the older Jacqueline Bisset who turns out to be the mother of his roommate Rob Lowe. It’s a sappy story that mixes coming-of-age angst with broad sex comedy.
For the first act of the film leading up to Bisset’s appearance Class isn’t sure if it’s a ribald sex comedy or a saccharine piece of nostalgia. Naked breasts abound as do tasteless pranks and innuendos. As is the case with Sixteen Candles (1983), Cusack is at the center of the more disreputable comic moments.
Then the film shifts gears to focus on McCarthy’s platonic love for Rob Lowe and his romantic infatuation with Bisset. The film is never critical of the affair despite the fact that it’s technically rape. Instead the bedding of Bisset is treated as another notch in McCarthy’s belt; an enviable position of sexual maturity and experience.
When complications inevitably arise they are so predictable that Class loses all of its urgency. From the Big Country (1958) style slug-fest to the flushing of weed down the toilet, Class is wholly predictable and boring. Class‘ status as an eighties teen comedy isn’t greater because, surprise, surprise, it’s a lousy little movie.
And yet, it is not without its art. Bisset, in what amounts to a rather small role, gives a tremendously vulnerable and nuanced performance. It’s as if Bisset’s work in Class were somehow stolen from another picture. Of all the characters in Class Bisset is the only one who is sympathetic or at all complex. Bisset’s role in underdeveloped yet she brings her character fully to life effortlessly.
But back to Brats. Class was the kind of movie Andrew McCarthy was starring in before the label “Brat Pack” was even a thought. Class is also the kind of movie Andrew McCarthy starred in after the term “Brat Pack” was coined. So could it be that he was typecast early on and that the term “Brat Pack” had little to do with the trajectory of his career?
