An Officer and a Gentleman

An Officer and a Gentleman is an uneven movie. At times, it really knows what it is and what it is about. At other times, it meanders about seemingly imitating the structure and form of other movies in the same genre. The end result is something compelling but flawed, largely redeemed by the emotional weight of its third act.

At the center of An Officer and a Gentleman’s story is the dream of escaping a blue collar life for something grander, both in experience and in material comfort. This idea is expressed through two different, but overlapping, perspectives: the protagonist, a military recruit looking to better himself through officer training, and the local girls who are looking to snag a graduating officer as their ticket out of a dead-end town.

Initially the movie’s main focus is exclusively on the military training side.  There is some brief talk of the local girls and some are introduced as potential love interests or flings, but the main focus of the story is Zack Mayo navigating officer training school.  Mayo comes from a tough blue collar background.  He grew up on the mean streets of the Philippines after his mother kills herself and he is forced to join his absentee father, a naval enlisted man, who has been stationed there.  In contrast, his peers are shown to be mostly middle class college educated individuals.  This puts Mayo in the position of an outsider, whether through perception or reality, which then becomes a central conflict to the movie’s on-base story arc.

However, this part of the film is its weakest. The arc isn’t bad, it is just a tad cliche in its plotting and unremarkable in its execution. Mayo’s streetwise and rebellious attitude clashing with the training camps’ more formal and straight-laced structure is nothing we haven’t seen before. It follows pretty close to the familiar formula for basic training movies where an individual is pushed to their limit by a drill instructor and it either breaks them of their ego and makes them a better person, like The Guardian, or it just straight breaks them, like Full Metal Jacket. However, An Officer and a Gentleman simply doesn’t come close to providing the emotional weight in this arena that the better of those style of films do, like the two examples listed.

A moment in particular that stood out to me was the scene where the drill sergeant gets Mayo to break down and realize his attitude is what is making him a loner and an outsider. Despite being the second most famous and well known scene in the movie, it didn’t really land for me. Mayo repeats over and over a line of realization, similar to Good Will Hunting’s “It’s not your fault,” but the text of the line and Mayo’s breakthrough moment don’t actually line up thematically. I also feel Richard Gere, who plays Mayo, makes some choices in his performance that seem off. He makes a weird, weepy face and his primal, sobbing delivery seems out of place for such a supposedly tough character, even in an intense and emotionally raw moment.

The other half of the movie is the dynamic between the candidates training on base and the local girls who flirt with them. Similar to the on-base arc, this part starts out a bit rough around the edges. However, as the film goes on, for my money it provides the most emotional weight to the piece. Flirting turns to flings, the flings lead to feelings, and the subsequent entanglements, betrayals, and emotional scars make for absolutely gripping cinema. By the end of the movie, while plenty of scenes still take place on-base, the training arc takes a backseat to the romantic complications of two thematically parallel couples and the film is better for it. Without giving too much away, the way something as simple and human as love and sex is escalated into complex stakes, and how those stakes resolve, I found to be quite powerful.

One other aspect of An Officer and a Gentleman that impressed me, that I want to touch on briefly, is its subtle and recurring use of a moral motif on the dangers of looking for a shortcut. Mayo initially tries to finesse his way through training and is worse for it. He is caught paying an enlisted man to do some of his chores for him and must endure intense and grueling punishment from his drill instructor as a result. At the end of this process he recognizes the value of not skating through life and he is reforged a better sailor and a better man.

Among the local girls, the horror stories all stem from girls using manipulative tactics, including pregnancies real and faked, to con unwitting officer candidates into marrying them as a means of escape. Through one story, it is made clear that love is at best a secondary concern for most of these girls. The primary goal is the financial freedom and mobility provided by an officer husband. To contrast this, Paula, one of the main love interests, eventually chooses not to be manipulative, not to look for a cheat or a shortcut to getting what she wants, and to be genuine and romantically, rather than economically, motivated, and she is the only one who actually gets what she wants.

Best of all, the movie does this all without ever feeling preachy or like a morality play. Adding this motif as an additional layer to the movie’s blue collar themes provides a richness to its story that, while subtle, is appreciated.

An Officer and a Gentleman is OK some of the time, good a lot of the time, and has a few flashes of brilliance. The weak start and so-so military stuff is more than made up for as the local girls enter the picture, the two elements of the story begin merging, and the movie delivers its emotional punches in the final act. If you can get past the beginning, the end is well worth the journey.

Would Recommend: If you are looking for a deep, emotionally resonant romantic drama and you don’t mind it taking a bit to get going.

Would Not Recommend: If you’re impatient with your dramas.