Black & White World

Breaking Away (1979)

A classic American “underdog” film.  Americans love underdog stories, in fact very early in my blogging career I wrote a whole little entry about America and the Underdog.  A blog entry so old it hasn’t been imported in from the old Blogger site yet.  Anyway, we Americans love our underdogs and we love to root for them, and that’s why the movie market is always saturated with these types of “Rocky” stories, like, well… Rocky.  Actually, every sports movie I can think of is about a team that doesn’t have a hope in hell of winning.  It’s not that surprising; movie heroes require adversity, they are no fun to watch if it’s easy for them to win.

Breaking Away manages to do something rather stunning—it takes two very well-worn American movie archetypes, the underdog story and the coming of age story, and while hitting all the major expected plot points of each, it tells a completely refreshing and charming and simple story, one where you probably won’t be surprised by the ending, but you won’t mind because of all the fun to be had along the way.

Some spoilers are ahead, for I want to talk about my two favorite moments in the movie, both of which are complete plot give-aways.  Although the movie is primarily a comedy, my two favorite moments are rather sad.  The first is after Dave comes home from the race with the Italians where they sabotaged his bike.  He apologizes to his father for his screw-up at work, giving the customers a refund for a lousy car.  Dave says, simply and miserably, “Everybody cheats.  I just didn’t know.” And his father, knowing that’s an indictment of himself, and knowing Dave must have learned it the hard way, replies just as simply, “Now you know.” A hard lesson, and maybe the only way to learn it is the hard way.

My other favorite sad moment is at the end, just after the Cutter team has won the Little 500 (see, big spoiler!), and they are surrounded by family, friends and well-wishers—Dave’s parents are there (even Dad left work to come watch), Moocher’s new bride, even Mike’s cop brother is there to congratulate him and give him a hug.  Then the camera finds Cyril, their fourth member, standing and clapping for himself, surrounded by strangers.  Not one family member there to cheer him on.  That’s heart-breaking, and yet it’s so real, maybe the most real moment in the movie.