MovieChat Forums > Fandango (1985) Discussion > SPOILERS: The Charming and Melancholy Fi...

SPOILERS: The Charming and Melancholy Final Act of Fandango

posted 19 days ago by roger1 (4046)
2 replies | jump to latest

Various movie stars get various "origin stories" and Kevin Costner's is one of the best:

He hadn't been working very long(indie youth comedies, pretty much an extra in a scene in Night Shift with Henry Winkler and Michael Keaton) when he was cast in a key role in Lawrence Kasdan's "The Big Chill" of 1983.

The role was key because "The Big Chill" was about a group of old 60s college buddies(men and women) come to a memorial weekend in honor of the one among them who killed himself. And that man was played by Kevin Costner, an unknown.

Costner filmed one flashback scene with all the stars of the movie and evidently Kasdan correctly surmised: this dead hero should NOT be seen, he couldn't live up to all the hype about him in discussions all through the movie. Plus: everyone else in the cast was an establshed star at SOME level(William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Glenn Close) and, again, Costner was a nobody.

One grand irony after Kevin Costner became, for a few years, a superstar: Costner WAS a bigger star than everybody else in The Big Chill. Eventually.

But in 1983, his part in The Big Chill pretty much devolved down to a shot of his hairline and forehead as his body was prepped for his funeral.

Lawrence Kasdan famously "made it up" to Costner in some pretty great ways.

He cast Costner two years later in his NEXT movie, a Western adventure called "Silverado"(with Big Chill veteran Kevin Kline in the lead). And he recommended Costner to Steven Spielberg(who personally directed Costner in one of his "Amazing Stories" episodes) and Brian DePalma(who cast Costner as Elliott Ness in The Untouchables after Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford and even Don Johnson didn't work out.)

The summer of 1987 was Kevin Costner's breakout summer as a star. First with the big budget "Untouchables" (for action, and with Connery and DeNiro to provide the established star power) and then with the DC thriller "No Way Out"(for sex in an early, fairly graphic scene with Sean Young that established him as a sex star.)

In two year intervals:

1983: Costner "breaks in and breaks out" with The Big Chill fiasco.
1987: Costner's stardom arrives: The Untouchables and No Way Out.

But in between, in 1985, the stage was set for Costner's stardom:

Silverado was a bit of a hit -- no blockbuster, but it got a lot of cable TV play.

And Fandango(with Spielberg's name on it sometimes)....well...

...nobody saw it on its brief release, but it soon got to HBO and developed a cult following that exploded(IMHO) when Costner finally made it in The Untouchables.

Fandango isn't much of a "star movie." The bigger star at the time was probably Judd Nelson -- who was famously driving The Breakfast Club to distraction as a detention room tough. Here, Nelson is a more sympathetic if strait-laced character as the one guy in a group of college grad pals who has joined the military and is willing to go to Vietnam.

Costner nonetheless has the true lead -- the leader, the most handsome one, the somewhat macho one (when making the rounds of Hollywood auditions, Costner was pegged as a mix of Gary Cooper and Steve McQueen -- Untouchables producer Art Linson said "he had McQueen written all over him.)

As happens in these buddy movies, "two buddies are more equal than the others" - and here is is the macho rebel Costner and his more shy and inward buddy...played by Sam Robards(son of Jason Robards and Lauren Bacall.) There are three other guys in the "fivesome" of recent college grads looking at Nam and their future -- Nelson's young military man, a quiet gentle giant, and a nerdy guy(sort of an embryonic Seinfeld) who sleeps from the start of the movie until he wakes up at the end) but the story is really about the macho guy and the sensitive one.

The picaresque , episodic road movie pairs up Costner and Robards and saves something very stinging and bittersweet for their ending together. Its that last act of Fandango(and its emotionally enveloping Pat Matheny soundtrack) that has kept the movie in the hearts of us who love it.

But BEFORE that final act, the movie centers on a sequence from which it was hatched in the first place -- originally -- as a 'short film unto itself.

The sequence is about our travelling five-some stopping at a ramshackle skydiving school and pressing Nelson into taking a jump. All very exciting and funny until the other four realize that Nelson's parachute is NOT properly packed -- its the laundry of the hippie wife of the hippie skydiving instructor. Terror and comedy ensue.

Writer-director Kevin Reynolds impressed Spielberg with this short film(just like Spielberg once upon a time impressed higher ups with his short film Amblin) and Fandango's OTHER episodes were built around the skydiving episode to make a full movie.

CONT

[–] roger1 (4046) 19 days ago

Truth be told, I don't much remember the OTHER episodes EXCEPT for the skydiving sequence mid-film and the beautiful finale. (I do believe, over the course of this Texas set film, that the boys go visit the remains of the Giant house.)

But to the finale:

To steer Robards away from Vietnam eligibility, it is contrived that he should marry his (previously unseen) sweetheart.

The boys are in an isolated, tiny Texas town with a few buildings, a bunch of old men playing cards, a small town square and a Gazebo.

Thus begins a long, long sequence that gets nicer and sadder as it moves along. The first part has no music, just the rustling hot breeze of an empty small Texas town over the course of an afternoon in which Costner rather charms and cajoles the townsfolk into prepaing an "impromptu wedding" with food, tables, drinks and lights to put around the gazebo(all at no cost, our boys are broke.)

The bride is flown in -- by the hippie skydiving instructor ("I owed you one," he tells Costner in regard to nearlly killing his friend) and the bride emerges from the plane and...

...its Costner's ex-girlfriend (we'd seen them happy, and then sad, in flashbacks) and now the movie turns to night, Pat Metheny's music suffuses everything and the pain begins.

There is something a bit corny -- a bit student-filmish -- about how Costner's character sacrifices the woman he could not commit to his more shy, less adventurous friend. One gets the picture -- the bride probably REALLY wanted Costner, but couldn't have him, and WILL commit to his friend instead(they've been involved for awhile too), the three other guys will witness the joy AND the pain of the whole thing and then...

...the wedding ends, and the "fabulous five guys" all break up and go their separate ways in the dark of the night. These are not "perfect scenes" (the Gentle Giant gets a rather strained send-off) but the emotion is there and I'll always remember the final shot:

CONT

[–] roger1 (4046) 19 days ago

Costner, up on a hill, the music sad and wistful as he watches the lights around the square and gazebo in the darkness below slowly shut off..one row, two rows, three rows...blackness.

Costner raises a beer in toast -- and Pat Metheny gives way to an anthem of the time: Blind Faith's "Can't Find My Way Home."

That song was from end-of-the-sixties 1969. THIS movie is set in the almost end of the Vietnam War 1972. (Though it opens with Elton John's 1983 Saturday Nights' Alright For Fighting to show us the five pals at their most rowdy and carefree heading on their roadtrip.)

Its funny: Kevin Costner was rewarded, from 1987 through 1992, with "superstardom" for a string of hits -- The Untouchables, No Way Out, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Dances With Wolves(Oscars for Best Picture and Costner Best Director) Robin Hood, JFK, and The Bodyguard before stumbling with some overpriced near-flops(Wyatt Earp, Waterworld, The Postman). He sort of struggled his way back to Yellowstone and new stardom in late middle age.

But before them all, there's Fandango. Not a hit, little seen, but something just as special -- in its own quirky way -- as any of the "big ones" that the script-savvy Costner chose before them.

I'll always remember Pat Metheny's music and those lights on the town square shutting down to darkness...