St. Elmo's Fire
First screened and reviewed in July 2025
Director: Joel Schumacher. Cast: Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, Mare Winningham, Emilio Estevez, Andie MacDowell, Jenny Wright, Martin Balsam, Joyce Van Patten, Anna Maria Horsford, Jon Cutler, Matthew Laurance. Screenplay: Joel Schumacher and Carl Kurlander. In Brief:
Characters as written are too dopey and entitled to carry a story of struggle. Shallow execution only worsens it.
VOR:③
Against my better judgment, I'm extending some benefit of the doubt to the archetypal pop-movie depiction of post-collegiate 80s yuppies. It lingers!
St. Elmo's Fire is about how life doesn't quite turn out how you plan. For example, you want to make a movie about how young adults and college-era friendships cope with change, uncertainty, emotional stuntedness, and terrible decisions, and you wind up with... this. A movie where Rob Lowe ditches his wife and baby because they harsh his sax vibe and Emilio Estevez is straightforwardly a stalker. And where Ally Sheedy wears pearls, even during sex, even in the shower, because the costume designer wants us to know she aspires to some kind of vaguely defined professional/political upward mobility (what is her job, exactly?), and Mare Winningham is dressed as a kind of pink-sweatered Women Talking Barbie because the same costume designer is even more worried than Rob Lowe is or the screenplay is that we might forget she's a virgin. I'm struggling to think of another movie character served worse by her clothes.
Honestly, Andrew, anyone watching this movie would have called you all a Brat Pack. And when I say "you," I especially mean the men, who uniformly give shallower, worse performances than the women—if you look away, as anyone should, from a visibly unready Andie MacDowell in an admittedly appalling part in a frighteningly misogynist storyline. The movie shits on the women almost as much as the male characters and the female costume designer do. Even the title song, spirited and unbelievably catchy as it is, is explicitly about consolidating your masculinity so you can soar with the eagles, as if Jules and Leslie and Wendy simply aren't there.
Joel Schumacher does deserve some credit for the moments of emotional truth that do occasionally surface, even amidst a sea of its opposite. Sheedy and Moore are most reliable in this area though Nelson, Winningham, and even McCarthy have their moments. And Schumacher clearly encouraged his cast to keep reaching earnestly for that goal of mature emotion, ambitiously expressed. That's admirable, even if half this cast seem unequipped for those tasks, and most of these characters aren't worth expressing; Lowe and Estevez in particular seem as stymied by adulthood as the people they're playing.
Schumacher persisted for decades as a disarmingly interesting, eloquent, reflective person but a barely capable director, forever hyperbolizing and overreaching his modest talent, much like Kevin and Billy and Alex do here. (Unless stalking counts, I'm not sure Kirbo even has a modest talent.) In a way, he's St. Elmo's Fire's most poignant case study in what the movie's trying to be about—the gap between who you think you are, or who you hope you're becoming, and who or what you're regularly showing yourself to be. He did have a knack for attaching himself to good people, though never enough of them at once. In this case, cinematographer Stephen H. Burum, a future Oscar nominee for Hoffa, lights the movie handsomely enough that it fitfully passes as the adult drama it's pervasively trying and mostly failing to be. But even one or two good eggs per basket, as Schumacher often managed, is a better ratio than the St. Elmo's Fire characters achieve. Odd choice to build a movie even halfway nostalgic for youthful friendships around a crew who don't deserve any movie at all. What they deserve is an octagonal room somewhere, so that each of them can sit in a separate corner and think about all the ways they've individually and collectively gone wrong. Grade:D+
