What a delight this film was. Can’t Buy Me Love is a charming story of a goofy nerd, Ronald Miller (Patrick Dempsey) who wants to get into the cool kids club, and pays the most popular girl in school, Cindy Mancini (Amanda Peterson) to pretend to date him.
At first, it is an arrangement of convenience because Cindy needs to buy a new outfit after ruining her mother’s clothes. Over time they both see that each other is deeper and more interesting than they originally thought. Until the truth comes out and everything falls apart.
Friendships and loyalties are tested. Words are exchanged, tears are shed, people change and grow, it is a lovely movie.
However, I didn’t actually watch that late 80’s classic with a bright-eyed Dr McDreamy, what I watched was No Hard Feelings (dir Gene Stupnitsky) starring and produced by Jennifer Lawrence who is playing Maddie Barker, a local of Montauk, New York. It is in the Hamptons, where the rich New Yorkers come and visit in the summer.
This has pushed costs up and she is close to losing the house that her mother left for her after she passed away. Maddie is a wise-cracking deadbeat that sleeps around, drinks too much, and doesn’t have a lot of direction in her life.
She gets her car repossessed and is in need of a car because being an Uber driver is a big part of her income. She sees an ad in the paper from a couple asking for someone to date their socially awkward 19-year-old son before he goes away to university.
The deal is that if Maddie dates their son, and by date him the parents, Laird (Matthew Broderick aka Ferris Bueller) and Allison (Laura Benanti), want Maddie to “date him hard” she will get a brand new car and be able to pay for her house.
She gladly takes up the challenge, trying to seduce the sweet and innocent and completely sheltered Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman).
This is where the film gets a little conflicted for me. The jokes come from the fact that this stunning woman is doing everything she can to sleep with a young man who is not in on it and isn’t consenting to her advances. He, to the audience’s shock, wants to get to know her before sleeping with her.
If it had been reversed and an attractive older guy was relentlessly attempting to sleep with a teenage girl it would either be an art house darling, if it was done well, or a straight-to-DVD creepy movie.
The film is carried by Lawernce, she is a star and is funny and the film does have some humorous moments. The relationship between Maddie and Percy echos that of Ronald and Cindy, where they grow to see the humanity in each other and learn that their way of life might need to go a little more to the center, Maddie to have some more direction and focus and Percy to have a bit less stability and more risk.
It is a fun, light movie that has some laughs and some good performances, but if you want something a little deeper I would check out Can’t Buy Me Love, it is a classic. Note, I haven’t seen it for years so it could be awful but I remember it fondly. Don’t ruin this for me.
2 July 2023
By Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe