Director Joel Schumacher, who died Monday at the age of 80, made more than 20 films over four decades. They ranged from blockbusters (Batman Forever) to outright disasters (The Incredible Shrinking Woman). He is probably best known for plucking a young Texan actor named Matthew McConaughey out of near obscurity and making him a star with A Time to Kill. (“The great part about Matthew,” Schumacher told a reporter back in 1996, “is he’s the kind of guy every mother would like their daughter to marry, but there’s also a badass, bad-boy side to him. It creates a wonderful tension onscreen.”)
But based on the reaction on social media in the hours following Schumacher’s death, perhaps his greatest legacy will be the generation-defining, coming-of-age film St. Elmo’s Fire. “Joel Schumacher has died, and I know everyone’s going to talk about his Batman movies, but I cannot overstate how much I loved St. Elmo’s Fire,” tweeted the film critic Jen Chaney. One fan recalled its importance in her romantic life (“I met my first fiancé while watching the newly released Blockbuster rented VHS of St. Elmos Fire on Super Bowl Sunday 1986”). Another tweeted: “May not be a cool choice, but #StElmosFire is genuinely one of my top 5 ever films (may even be top 3). There, I admit it. I watch it regularly and still learn from it.”
And the actor Billy Eichner took to Twitter to not only declare his admiration for the 1985 film but also to pay tribute to Schumacher’s pioneering role in Hollywood. “RIP Joel Schumacher,” tweeted Eichner. “I love St Elmo’s Fire. He was a (very) outspoken gay director before that was cool, and his movies are a throwback to a time when Hollywood made something other than bloated action films or Oscar bait homework assignments. RIP Joel. I’m glad you had fun.”
What makes St. Elmo’s Fire so enduring? The reviews were not enthusiastic. The film “is all surface—all speed and stylishness without a bit of emotional resonance beneath,” wrote Sheila Benson in the Los Angeles Times. “Barely has there been a group of more smug and obnoxious characters in a single film than in St. Elmo’s Fire, a drama about the trauma of the post-college months of today’s materialistic young graduates,” pronounced Gene Siskel in the Chicago Tribune. And in the New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “The film is edited so skittishly that the actors are barely able to complete their sentences, let alone their thoughts.”
But in a line that both dismissed and praised the film almost simultaneously, Maslin put her finger on why it would go on to resonate so powerfully with young audiences: “St. Elmo’s Fire is most appealing when it simply gives the actors a chance to flirt with the camera and with one another.”
And, yes, the actors. Has there ever been a cast so uniformly gorgeous—almost all on the cusp of their careers? Even without checking IMDB, most devoted fans could rattle off all of their names without missing a beat: Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Andrew McCarthy, Mare Winningham, and Ally Sheedy. They even acquired a hard-to-shred nickname: the Brat Pack.
“I really think St. Elmo’s Fire does, arguably, the best job I’ve ever seen in a film of portraying friendship with the kind of passion and cinematic poignancy that is normally reserved for portraying romantic love,” said Susannah Gora, author of You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried, a book on the Brat Pack, in a 2015 Vanity Fair article marking the 30th anniversary of the film. “We see this clique of friends and just the chemistry they have with each other—the arms around each other’s shoulders, and the inside jokes and the laughter—that incredible connection that they have with each other. It translates to the audience with a kind of passion and cinematic excitement that normally is reserved for when you’re watching romantic love portrayed onscreen.”
No, St. Elmo’s Fire is not great cinema and probably even not Schumacher’s best movie. (That might be the underrated Tigerland, starring yet another unknown, Colin Farrell.) But it endures because it captures almost perfectly a time and a place that no one who was the same age as those seven actors will ever forget. As Maslin wrote in the tagline to her Times review: “St. Elmo’s Fire is as good a film as any to put into a time capsule this year—to show what and whom young viewers want and how eager Hollywood is to give it to them.”