'Say Anything' At 25: Nothing Bought, Sold Or Processed

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'Say Anything' At 25: Nothing Bought, Sold Or Processed

by Linda Holmes
April 13, 2014

"I don't feel anything."

Those are, surprisingly enough, the first words of the deeply felt Say Anything, which turns 25 years old on Monday. It opened April 14, 1989, and that weekend, it made $5.2 million. It wasn't enough to come anywhere close to what Major League pulled down in its second week ($9.1 million), but it was enough to come in one slot ahead of the opening weekend of the Tony Danza comedy She's Out of Control ($4.6 million).

John Cusack, four years past playing a college freshman in The Sure Thing, plays graduating high school senior Lloyd Dobler. Ione Skye, three years after her debut in the very dark drama River's Edge, plays the brilliant and shy Diane Court. And John Mahoney, four years before he found sitcom immortality as Frasier Crane's father Martin, plays Diane's adoring and deeply flawed father, Jim. Writer and first-time director Cameron Crowe was best-known at the time for the screenplay for Fast Times at Ridgemont High — which is fondly remembered now as the launching pad for many respectable careers, but which Roger Ebert had called "a failure of taste, tone and nerve."

At the center of Say Anything is Crowe's deep empathy for the uncertainty and ambivalence, bordering on existential terror, that the end of high school naturally brings to a lot of kids. Even for someone like Diane, whose future looks as bright as she and her father have meticulously planned it to be, there are small problems — what happens when you win a prestigious opportunity to study abroad and you're afraid to fly? — and big problems — why are men from the IRS at the door to talk to your dad?

And of course, there is Lloyd, perhaps the single most human 19-year-old that the films of the '80s and '90s gave to us. He lives with his sister and her son, he's interested in kickboxing maybe, he's full of nascent theories about how life works, and he's knee-bouncingly, jitter-havingly excited about how smart and thoughtful and serious Diane is. ...

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