Ciara Moloney
It’s easy to forget when he hasn’t directed a good movie in thirty years, but Rob Reiner had a 1980s as good as Francis Ford Coppola had a 1970s. His 1984 directorial debut, This Is Spinal Tap, is one of the funniest films ever made, and in the next five years, he helmed all-time best-of-their-genre contenders across coming-of-age drama (Stand By Me), fantasy adventure (The Princess Bride), and romantic comedy (When Harry Met Sally…). It’s a deck so stacked with beloved classics that a precious film got lost in the shuffle. His sophomore feature, The Sure Thing – released forty years ago this week – is a forgotten masterpiece.
Roger Ebert dubbed The Sure Thing “a small miracle.” Ebert’s review, like many on the film’s release, favourably compares its emotional sophistication to teen sex comedies like Porky’s. “One of the unique things about the movie is that the characters show a normal shyness about sex,” Ebert writes, unlike “most movie teenagers” who are “not shy, not insecure, not modest, and occasionally not human.” From the present, it sounds like he’s overstating the ubiquity of Porky’s-style sex comedies – The Sure Thing came out just weeks after The Breakfast Club, which is razor-focused on the internal emotional lives of its sometimes shy, insecure, modest and always human teenage characters. What makes The Sure Thing unique is how it bridges the insurmountable gap between Porky’s and Pretty in Pink. It is, as Jasper Sharp writes for the BFI, “sassy yet never bawdy and sentimental while never mawkish.” Its teenage characters have sex, not as fodder for dirty jokes, but as part of their complex emotional lives. It is a film that bridges, and whose characters must bridge, the gap between sex and love.
Though Reiner claimed never to have seen It Happened One Night, it’s hard not to see The Sure Thing as a teen movie riff on Frank Capra’s classic screwball comedy. It’s about two freshman college students who are both travelling from their northeastern university to California for winter break. Alison (Daphne Zuniga) is going to visit her square future-lawyer boyfriend. Tantalised by his best friend’s tales of sex, sun and partying, Gib (John Cusack) is going to California on the promise of being set up with a girl – the titular “sure thing.” (He’s already struck out with just about every girl in New England, Alison included.)
They get stuck together for the journey when they both take the same offer on a rideshare board. When the couple driving gets sick of Gib and Alison’s constant bickering – not to mention their refusal to sing showtunes – they kick them out of the car in the middle of nowhere. Like Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable in It Happened One Night, they reluctantly end up hitchhiking together, and vehemently negotiate the sleeping arrangements in motel rooms along the way. In classic rom-com fashion, Gib and Alison seem like a total mismatch but slowly find they’re perfect for each other – and like the best examples of that formula, it’s not the flick of a switch: their arguments fizz with a rat-a-tat rhythm, so you can see how well they fit together even when they hate each other’s guts.
John Cusack was only sixteen when he was cast as Gib, his first lead role after a small part in Sixteen Candles the previous year. It’s a virtuoso turn, the self-evident birth of a movie star. With a lesser performance, Gib would seem an overwritten smart alec, or worse, a slimy and unsympathetic wannabe lothario. (He uses “Did you know that Nietzsche died of syphilis?” as a pick-up line.) But Cusack is preternaturally affable, and sells a sweetness to add caramel to the salt of Gib’s sex-crazed smartass act. Even when he’s doing elaborate bits – when he asks Alison to tutor him, he spins a story about how if she doesn’t, he’ll end up going to prison for drug trafficking and dying in the gutter huffing paint thinner – it feels authentic: not an inhuman joke vehicle but the very real kind of eighteen-year-old who is very funny, but thinks he’s a little funnier than that. In Cusack’s hands, Gib is at once dorky and suave, world-weary and wide-eyed.
Zuniga hasn’t had as big a career as Cusack, but she is just as good opposite him. She’s an ideal scene partner, relentless in the give-and-take when it would be so easy to be overwhelmed by Cusack’s antics. As a character, Alison is uptight and fussy, but Zuniga never plays her as a humourless shrew. When Gib makes his first failed attempt to come onto her, she pushes him to the ground. She asks if she hurt him; he says no, and it’s a perfect comic beat when she kicks him in response. In that scene, Gib uses the line “we speak each other’s unspoken language” as a come-on. But when he and Alison fall in love, the truth is something better: they speak each other’s repartee.
“The Sure Thing” is not currently streaming, but it is available on Blu-ray.
