Valley Girl (1983)

[StevePulaski]

Valley Girl (1983)
Directed by: Martha Coolidge

Nicolas Cage and Cameron Dye.

Rating: ★★★

Julie Richman (Deborah Foreman) is your prototypical California gal, complete with impeccable beauty, popularity, and a valley girl accent you could hear on the opposite end of the coast. Her friends can't understand why she isn't happy with her boyfriend Tommy (Michael Bowen), despite him clearly having the personality of a doormat, but I digress. It's at her friend Suzi's (Michelle Meyrink) that she formally meets Randy (Nicolas Cage), a Hollywood punk with shaggy hair and a unique sense of style, with whom she exchanged glances earlier at the beach. Any soul can see the chemistry Julie and Randy have with one another is world's different from the pseudo-arranged union she shares with Tommy on the grounds that they're both attractive and popular. But it is high school, after all, and peer pressure, social status, and going with convention can either mean the beginning or end of your life.

Valley Girl is a charming comedy that exudes all the style and sounds of the 1980s you've come to appreciate. The film feels like a time-capsule made solely to encapsulate an era defined by excess and eminently catchy New Wave bops. The strongest detail in Valley Girl is its soundtrack, which is complete with timeless and infectious one-hit wonders such as The Flirts' groovy malt-shop ditty "Jukebox (Don't Put Another Dime) and Josie Cotton's humorous "Johnny Are You Queer?" There's even an adorable montage set to Modern English's instantly recognizable "I Melt with You," which in a lesser film, might've seemed annoyingly on the nose. In a film as earnest as Martha Coolidge's nostalgic ode to a simpler time, it's perfect.

Perhaps its Coolidge's female touch as a director (working off of a screenplay by Wayne Crawford and Andrew Lane) that sells the validity of Julie's apprehensions to dating someone like Randy. To those who have grown out of high school cliques, or never subscribed to one in particular, it admittedly feels like a facile conflict in a film that wants to put romance and music first. If you recall the unforgiving social stigmas that can come with being in school and potentially risking your squeaky-clean reputation by dating someone from the opposite side of the tracks, the overarching conflict might not seem so small. But it's the affectionate core of Foreman and Cage who sell the story with their affable charisma, especially Cage who gives cinephiles a taste of the unhinged side of his acting that would follow in subsequent decades.

Often unsung but noteworthy are Julie's parents, played by Colleen Camp and Frederic Forrest, as two Woodstock-era hippies who now run a health-food store. Many films might've had a tendency to overplay their types or make the obligatory parents irritatingly square, but Crawford and Lane give us just enough of their personalities to make them a compliment to the story. They're not blind to their daughter's budging conflict of being herself versus assuming the role her peers want her to play, and they turn up semi-frequently either to offer light-hearted wisdom or show the contrast in generations. Also strong is Lee Purcell as the mother of one of Julie's friends, who is uproariously funny in a sequence where she is openly flirting with a man closer to Julie's age than her own. How this sequence hasn't become more discussed for a film that's retained something of a cult status in recent years is beyond me.

Lastly, one anecdote of Valley Girl I can't get over: Cage (19 at the time) and Foreman (21) began dating late into filming, and both had a difficult time, emotionally speaking, trying to shoot the breakup scene during the climax. Coolidge had to coach the two into making it believable for the screen but not personal to one another. If that's not an effective illustration of the innocence this picture harbors, I don't know what is.

NOTE: My review of the Valley Girl remake from 2020: stevethemovieman.proboards.com/thread/6435/valley-girl-2020

Starring: Deborah Foreman, Nicolas Cage, Michael Bowen, Colleen Camp, Frederic Forrest, Michelle Meyrink, Lee Purcell, and Cameron Dye. Directed by: Martha Coolidge.