As I continue to revisit beloved movies of my past, I recently had the chance to watch The Flamingo Kid again. Starring a young Matt Dillon in the lead, it’s a coming-of-age story from 1984, though set about twenty years earlier (with a fun soundtrack of music from that era—Dion and the like).
If you read through the list of movies I have written about, you’ll find a disproportionate number are documentaries, foreign films, serious indies, etc.—films that maybe take a little more effort than does typical Hollywood fare (but that often enough warrant that effort; if not, I’d soon change my moviegoing habits). The Flamingo Kid isn’t “challenging” in that sense. But that doesn’t mean it’s something frivolous, a “dumb” movie that at best can be a guilty pleasure. It’s primarily a comedy, but it has intelligent things to say about some serious life issues. I rate it highly as genuinely fun, pleasant, thoughtful, heartwarming entertainment.
Jeffrey Willis is a teenager living in a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn. His father is a plumber, and he has a stay-at-home mom and a sister who seems the shy, bookish type. It’s a humble life, but not a life of terrible privation. This was back in the time when a man with steady blue collar work could support a family on one income at a decent level that could include a car, an occasional vacation, and maybe even college for his kids.
It’s not a bad life, but Mr. Willis wants more for his children, and Jeffrey wants more for his own future—they’re on the same page there. Problems ensue when it turns out the specifics of those visions don’t always line up.
A few families from the Willises’ neighborhood have succeeded in moving away and up in the world, including a couple pals of Jeffrey’s that he retains ties with. One day they invite him to accompany them as their guest at the swanky Club Flamingo, a beach resort on the ocean.
It’s an eye-opening day for Jeffrey, from the chance to see how the other half lives, to the pretty girl who actually returns his flirtations, to the high stakes gin rummy games that are one of the main social activities at the Flamingo (Jeffrey being a pretty serious gin rummy player himself). But it’s also, sadly, presumably a one-time only experience.
But then through a fluky series of events on his way out, he is offered a job parking cars, and thus is able to return to the Flamingo regularly. Soon he becomes a cabana boy (considered a step up), thus enabling him to interact with members and guests inside the club.
He gets a little summer romance thing going with the cute blonde he had met that first day—Carla (Wayne Gretzky’s wife in real life, by the way, which I never knew until I just read it—posed nude in Playboy too). Carla lives in California but is spending the summer with her aunt and uncle.
Her uncle is Phil Brody, one of the biggest of the big shots at the Flamingo, and someone who, if anything, will capture Jeffrey’s attention and influence him even more than the lovely Carla.
Mr. Brody is a very wealthy owner of car dealerships, a self-made man who has bought his way into the class that people like his wife were born into. As a result, he tends to have some different qualities—both good and bad—than those more accustomed to wealth who take it for granted that they are entitled to their privilege just by nature of who they are.
He has a “regular guy” garrulousness and charisma that enables him to effortlessly connect with all around him, including those like Jeffrey who are of such a different social world from the typical denizens of the Flamingo, whereas someone like his snooty wife would not only struggle to connect with someone so “beneath” her, but would find it incomprehensible why anyone of quality would want to.
He has a slick style, a willingness to do anything and everything it takes to succeed, a way of looking for angles and operating in moral gray areas, that the more well-established members of the social class he has worked himself into might well perceive as a bit unseemly or money-grubbing.
Not that Jeffrey sees and appreciates all this, not yet. He just knows that there’s something awe-inspiring about Mr. Brody.
After Jeffrey visits the intimidatingly lavish Brody mansion, Mr. Brody adopts him as a sort of protégé. He has a daughter but no son, and he sees in Jeffrey someone real who is a welcome contrast to the sort of arrogant folks he mostly interacts with nowadays (you sense that he finds them a bit phony, is amused by getting over on them and getting them to accept and even truckle to him, but doesn’t see himself as truly one of them), so he welcomes the chance to take the impressionable young man under his wing.
He mentors Jeffrey in gin rummy, imparts on him the life lessons he has learned (such as the importance of putting yourself into a position to work smart rather than work hard), and fills his head with dreams that he too can convert his personable nature, natural charm, and gift of gab into the life of luxury Mr. Brody has achieved by pursuing a wheeler dealer, salesman path.
None of which sits well with Mr. Willis. The more he picks up little details about his son’s summer and hears the way he now idolizes this Mr. Brody, the less happy he is.
He had arranged a summer office job for Jeffrey, only to see him turn it down to work at the Flamingo. He has had his children on track their whole life to go to college; now Jeffrey (parroting Mr. Brody of course) speaks of college as overrated and unnecessary for someone like him, and speculates about skipping it entirely so as to sooner embark on the road to riches as a salesman. He has always had Jeffrey’s respect, always been able to confidently rely on Jeffrey seeing him as his role model; now this stranger has suddenly become a rival father figure to Jeffrey.
Jeffrey is growing up, growing away from him and out of his control, developing his own ideas and values that don’t always reflect those that he has proudly based his life on and raised his family with, and this renders him understandably off-balance and displeased, and causes significant tension between him and his son, to the point that Jeffrey even moves out.
The end of summer means the end of the romance with Carla, as it inevitably must. When they part they go through the motions of promising that they will stay in touch, speculating about how they will arrange to see each other next, but you know, and they probably do too, that that will never happen, that when the stars align for a special summer in your youth when you can pursue a hot and heavy romance with someone from a very different world—in terms of geography in this case, but more importantly social class and lifestyle—you need to fully experience and appreciate it in the moment for all its magic, and not take it as a sign that you are soulmates for life.
But arguably even more importantly, the end of summer means the end of Jeffrey’s hero worship of Mr. Brody. Multiple incidents bring about his disillusionment.
Which leads to my favorite scene of the movie, at the very end. The Willis family has gathered at one of their favorite restaurants, Larry’s Fish House (with the all-time great slogan “Any Fish You Wish”). Jeffrey is invited, but not expected to attend.
But there he is, the Prodigal Son returned, to the delight of all. Though Mr. Willis must out of pride mask that delight, and Jeffrey must out of pride match his stiffness.
They verbally dance around each other a bit, feeling each other out, gradually coming to an understanding as Jeffrey lets him know that “summer’s over, Dad” and hence that there’s hope that the sources of conflict between them are as well. Mr. Willis is sufficiently satisfied to offer his son a hug. Jeffrey accepts, but of course with a show of reluctance, a kind of “OK but make it quick; I’m a cool teenager after all, and we’re in public” attitude.
Except then comes the most beautiful moment of the film. Overcome by the rollercoaster of emotions of the most important summer of his life, of all he has seen, all it has taught him, all the success he has had, all the disillusionment he has experienced, all the poses he has had to adopt, all he has grown, all he has learned about himself, his place in the world, and his place in the family, Jeffrey can sustain no such superficial youthful aloofness. The façade crumbles in an instant and with voice cracking he returns his father’s hug, only more intensely, with more emotion, with more appreciation. You can see that the initially surprised Mr. Willis too is close to tears.
It’s only a moment, and it’s over almost immediately, but it’s long enough that Mr. Willis knows that he has his son back, and he knows, and we know, that whatever path Jeffrey takes, however much it might ultimately differ from his father’s path, or the path his father envisions for him, he is going to be fine and the bonds of family will never be truly broken.
That embrace chokes me up every time. The Flamingo Kid is a comedy, and succeeds as such, but it has beauty and truth to it that only a precious few of even successful comedies have.
Philo on Movies 