Breaking Away

Breaking Away is a coming of age story wrapped in a sports wrapper. For many people it is one of their favorite coming of age movies, or even just one of their favorite movies period. I liked it, but I didn’t resonate with it in that way. It wasn’t that there was nothing I connected with, but it did often feel like something made in a very different time, set in a very different place, than what I could identify with from my own time as a late teen.

At the center of the struggles of our four main characters is the divide between the “cutters” and everyone else. Cutters, in this context, is a slang term taken from stone cutting, the town’s largest employer of people without college educations, but is really just shorthand for anyone blue collar. For the teens of the movie, your status as a cutter is part of your identity and informs both how you see the world and how the world sees you. This is part of what made the movie difficult for me to connect with, as this kind of locked class identity is very far from my own experiences growing up. The boys in the film, all cutters themselves, struggle with what their lives post high school are shaping up to be, and at least initially all of them assume that college is not an option by virtue of their status as cutters; by their class, essentially.

For people of my generation and later, college has been more of a ubiquitous concept, with the limits on attendance being more academic than financial… given that you are willing to take on the necessary debt, hunt down relevant scholarships, spend a year or two in community college before transferring, and/or take advantage of a myriad other options for financial assistance. As such, this central tension of college attendance as a class signifier is something that feels very foreign.

When the rich college kids show up at the quarry to go diving, and upset the cutter kids by showing up “on their turf,” there is a multi-layer element to the scene. The college kids are being jerks, but their attitudes are intended to carry a snobbishness associated with their class too. Their proficiency at diving and speed at swimming indicate the benefits of their upbringing: the time and money afforded them by their parents to train those skills. This is amplified by the fact that, in the scene, the rich guys are showing off for the girls that came with them, which adds an element of emasculation and humiliation (of the cutters) to the proceedings. This is great for setting a tone for the underdog story of the bicycle race that acts as the film’s climax. It does an excellent job of calling one’s attention to the divide between the cutter boys and the girls that are “out of their league,” which is important for the main character, Dave, and his future entanglements. It was only marginally effective on me, though, as the rude behavior of the rich kids stood out far more to me than all of that subtext, given my own life experiences.

Elitism continues as a theme in the movie in other ways, not all of which made perfect sense to me. The movie neatly brings together a collegiate bicycle race and Dave’s passion for bicycle racing to create a moment where the cutters can show up their class “superiors.” In the build up to this, Dave races in an event with professional Italian cyclists, a country and team he looks up to a great deal. The Italians show a certain contempt that he can, for at least part of the race, keep up with them and engage in dirty tricks to ensure that he doesn’t represent a threat to their expected top finishes. This seems like it has something to say about elitism and morality, in the behavior of the lauded Italian athletes, and sets up a reckoning for Dave around competition, disillusionment, and a challenge to his personal moral compass. Weirdly, though, it doesn’t actually go anywhere. The themes of elitism are not well tied back into the central tensions of the movie, the disillusionment and moral quandary never really appears or is meaningfully resolved, and so the whole piece feels a bit vestigial.

Much more effective is the coming of age elements of the movie, especially around Dave, his out of place love of Italian everything, his struggles with romantic maturation, and his clashes with a father who doesn’t really understand him. This can be downright funny, at times. Dave’s propensity for flummoxing his more traditional midwestern father by singing Opera in the shower or speaking in Italian is more than enough to elicit laughs, at least from me. But it can also be heartbreaking and redemptive, as their disagreements reach a breakpoint. Watching Dave and his pals all grow up through the struggles of early adulthood, still experimenting with identity and their place in the world, is highly entertaining stuff and Dave’s story in particular puts those things into overdrive, since he attacks everything in life with such gusto.

This all builds to the climactic race that pits one team of townies against a field of college, mostly fraternity based, racing teams with big egos and even worse attitudes. The actual race itself is nothing special, but this is a classic sports movie with a big heart so the fact that it can be a bit cliche and implausible doesn’t really matter much. To the extent that the movie carries a message in its conclusion, it is that with enough hard work nothing can stop you from accomplishing something you put your body and soul into. The college kids could dive better and swim better because of their upbringing. They, presumably, were given similar advantages with cycling. And yet, Dave is still able to out-perform them by virtue of the sheer amount of effort he put in and the passion he feels for always improving. This is like a more triumphant, and less dangerously obsessive, look at coming of age through the lens of sports than the somewhat similar Vision Quest.

Ultimately, in that coming of age arc, the movie gets more nuanced than a simple cutter vs. college dichotomy, asking whether those distinctions have any meaning at all. I, of course, was amused but not moved by such questions since the answer seemed obvious to me from the opening frame. However, I could see how someone who felt more trapped by circumstance, or lived somewhere with a more obvious and pronounced separation between the haves and the have-nots, could find this movie and its explorations of those topics, especially around the formative years of being a late teen, extremely rewarding. For me, however, I thought it was just pretty good.

Would Recommend: If you are in the mood for a teenage sports movie with a lot of heart.

Would Not Recommend: If you are tired of stories about class warfare.