Best Keanu: “My mom, she works hard too, right? So why is he in charge of everything? Because he’s the king? Well, I’m calling a revolution.”

If it had been a quote from Keanu, the lede would have been this: “You can’t come in unless you’re dressed from Dallas or Dynasty.” That’s Lesley’s line as she’s guarding the door at homecoming, where Keanu’s character, Rupert, and his biker sometimes-friends get drunk and crash.

The line is hilarious, at least now, in 2023, although it may have prompted only a chuckle in 1988 — if that. That was the moment when The Prince of Pennsylvania totally won me over, although I was already solidly in the “yes” column for this film starting with its early scenes.

A positive reception, my own, that I wasn’t expecting. This was released in 1988, after all, the same year Keanu starred in the showcase of everything-that-was-wrong-about-the-1980s The Night Before and the sickeningly repulsive child rape feature Dangerous Liaisons. I have no personal desire to revisit the 1980s, in mind or in my movie-watching, so screening The Prince of Pennsylvania was evidence I’m nearing the end of the list of Keanu movies, but don’t yet have the energy to write about the ones I loved but have so much to say I need to set aside time to do it (count among those in particular the John Wick and Matrix films). I only watched Pennsylvania today because despite renting 1996’s Chain Reaction, I couldn’t get the stream to work, and I wasn’t in the mood to return to my life’s other responsibilities.

(Side note: Permanent Record was also released in 1988 and I enjoyed that movie, especially the rawness of some of Keanu’s performance.)

As Lesley says — twice — “You can’t come in unless you’re dressed from Dallas or Dynasty,” one who grew up in this era has flashbacks to the cliquey-ness, the conformity, the judgment, and the dumb social rules that governed the 1980s, especially in high schools. Rupert is a weird kid — although he must be at least 18, since his dad says he was in Vietnam when he was Rupert’s age — and that doesn’t fly well in this time, when the whole notion of liking people for who they are was in and of itself fringe and extreme.

It’s the homecoming dance scene that explicitly tells the audience that Pennsylvania, like the Winona Ryder classic from a couple of years earlier, Heathers, is going to shine a bit of a light on that 80s high school narrative and flip it for those of us who found it constraining and/or traumatizing.

Pennsylvania is also funny, although it probably wasn’t funny enough at the time to please critics or audiences. There’s wit and strong dialogue. It’s a nice looking film with a distinct colour scheme that feels unusual for this era; Amy Madigan’s character, Carla, has a shop and home that feels built from a production designer’s loving palette, and each scene seems to have a careful balance of just the right shades of red and blue. The scenes of the coal mine where Rupert works alongside his father are smartly crafted to give a sense of space and texture; the chains where the workers string up their uniforms are not dissimilar to those keeping shut the below ground toilet and the chains Rupert and Carla use to immobilize Rupert’s father.

Which is all to say there’s care here, in this film. There’s a subtle depth to it that elevates it slightly above a drama with some comedic elements. It’s a good movie. There’s soul here, and it’s not too hard to spot.

Since I hold fast to my assessment that Dangerous Liaisons is nothing more than a child rape film, I feel obliged to talk about the Rupert-Carla storyline in Pennsylvania — and to make it really, really clear how it’s different, and even different from the weird sexual exploitation of Lori Loughlin’s character in The Night Before. (Seriously, 1988 was a bad year. I didn’t even know about these films when I was 13, turning 14, in 1988, but I felt and experienced everything they represented.).

We don’t learn Carla’s exact age in this movie, but she’s clearly older and has a child. Amy Madigan was 38 in 1988 and Keanu 24. In the film, he’s presented as a high school dropout, but his father’s line about Vietnam, if taken literally, would make him technically an adult. I’ll admit that the relationship between Carla and Rupert, which is sexual, doesn’t bother me; it doesn’t feel exploitive, although if the genders were flipped I would likely say it is.

Which, of course, is problematic. It is entirely reasonable to see the relationship between Carla and Rupert as one of exploitation. It does not, however, qualify as rape, which is clearly (and repulsively) the case in Dangerous Liaisons. The one scene of Carla’s naked back, as she emerges from bed where she’s just copulated with Rupert, is not the same in form or in spirit as Lori Loughlin’s semi-clothed high schooler handcuffed to a bed, about to be sold into sex trafficking, as “comedy” in The Night Before. There is some nuance here, but I’ll admit others may see it differently, and legitimately so.

Pennsylvania has strong female leads, with Madigan and Rupert’s mother Pam, played by Bonnie Bedelia, driving the story. (On that note, I just discovered through a Google search to get the correct spelling of Bedelia’s name that she’s the aunt of Macaulay and Kieran Culkin — who knew?). As Rupert starts work in the mine, he finds a note Pam left in his lunchbox: “Don’t take any shit. I love you. Mom.”

Both Pam and Carla are carrying on affairs with otherwise attached men — in Pam’s case, it’s her husband Gary’s friend, whom she vastly prefers. Carla is splitting her time between Rupert and Trooper Joe, the father of her child who was married to someone else. Joe doesn’t appear to be currently attached, but his emotional commitments belong elsewhere, other than with Carla. These women are not happy, but neither are the men. The women are not pathetic or looking to be saved, just simply for a way out — if anyone’s vulnerable in this whole group, it’s Rupert, who ultimately takes off on his own, no longer willing to be second fiddle to Joe in his relationship with Carla.

Keanu doesn’t play dumb in this role, which you are sort of inclined to expect because most of Keanu of this era resembles Ted “Theodore” Logan, so you’re always expecting Ted “Theodore” Logan. He’s a weird kid, with an okay head on his shoulders, with maybe just a lot to figure out. But you get the sense he’ll get there, and he’ll respect women along the way.

April 2023