If The Graduate and The Apartment had a 1980s baby, it might look something like Risky Business, Tom Cruise’s breakout film about an affluent, anxiety-ridden teen who meets the capitalist expectations of his home and school by turning his parents’ house into a brothel.
The movie’s premise suggests something akin to Animal House or Porky’s, but writer-director Paul Brickman has more than comic sexploitation on his mind. Sure, Risky Business is partially an adolescent fantasy, but it’s even more about how the prosperity pressures placed upon Joel Goodsen have frayed his nerves to the point that he can’t even bring his erotic dreams to fruition. (The reverie that opens the movie, about a mystery woman taking a shower, devolves into a stress dream about being late for a college entrance exam.)
Indeed, all of Risky Business could be read as a fantasy that’s teetering on the edge of a nightmare. There is the woozy Tangerine Dream score, as well as the slightly floating camera style employed by cinematographers Bruce Surtees and Reynaldo Villalobos. Even when call girl Lana (Rebecca De Mornay) shows up, the ensuing sex montage—in which the wind, at one point, blows open Joel’s patio doors—plays like a cheesy, 1980s music video (one Joel might have watched) and is quickly followed by the economic realities of the situation. How much does Joel owe her? How will he get the money? Joel’s fiscal jam only becomes more heightened when he takes his father’s Porsche out and it ends up in Lake Michigan.
In the aftermath of that and other mishaps, Joel and Lana hatch a plan combining a project he’s been assigned as part of his Future Enterprisers club and her own business acumen. (“It was great the way her mind worked,” Joel says in voiceover. “No doubt, no guilt, no fear. None of my specialties.”) While Lana arranges for fellow sex workers to head to Joel’s house while his parents are out of town, he markets the scheme to his friends. The forces of supply and demand take over and Joel and Lana make thousands of dollars over the course of one evening. (Joel also squeezes in an interview with a Princeton recruiter that he had forgotten was scheduled for the same night.)
De Mornay, as Joel’s description suggests, makes Lana more than a sex object; she has a slippery intelligence always percolating beneath the Barbie surface. As for Cruise, watching him in Risky Business is like watching a megastar emerge from a chrysalis. As Joel goes from panic-attacked teen to grinning, Ray-Ban-wearing businessman, you can see him becoming TOM CRUISE before your very eyes. He gains years—and box-office potential—over the course of the movie.
(8/20/2023)
