How Paul Brickman Reinvented the Teen Sex Comedy by Making ‘Risky Business’ More Godard and Bertolucci Than ‘Porky’s’

Film critic Roger Ebert used to say that a movie wasn’t about what it was about — it was about how it was about what it was about.

That’s why, when someone told him that they weren’t interested in “Raging Bull” because they didn’t like boxing, he immediately dismissed that person as an idiot. Few directors prove Ebert’s thesis as definitively as Paul Brickman, whose “Risky Business” is newly available in an exquisite 4K UHD edition from Criterion. While this 1983 comedy is unquestionably “about” a lot in the traditional literary sense — even on the page, it’s an exceptionally accomplished piece of satirical storytelling filled with razor-sharp irony, fertile metaphors, and clever structural conceits — what elevates it to true greatness is a style no one but Brickman would have thought to apply to the subject matter.

That subject matter — a sexually inexperienced teenager partners with a sex worker to turn his parents’ home into a brothel — places “Risky Business” firmly in the cycle of post-“Porky’s” teen sex comedies about boys losing their virginity, movies like “The Last American Virgin,” “My Tutor,” and “Class,” a Rob Lowe-Andrew McCarthy flick that opened a week before Brickman’s film. The superficial resemblance between these movies probably helped “Risky Business” from a marketing standpoint (though, according to interviews on the Criterion disc, it was not an easy movie to get greenlit). Yet Brickman takes such a diametrically opposed approach to the teen sex comedy that “Risky Business” barely feels like it belongs to the trend at all.

Brickman uses the conventions of the genre as a Trojan Horse to make a movie about what he’s really interested in, which isn’t horny teenagers but capitalism and how it (and attitudes toward it) evolved in America during the Reagan era. Many critics have compared “Risky Business” to “The Graduate,” and it serves a similar function in commenting on the early 1980s the way that “The Graduate” did on the late 1960s. The difference between the films and the times they were made in is that the young hero of “The Graduate” is paralyzed by the thought of entering his parents’ world (though he also posits no viable alternative), while the kids in “Risky Business” are running straight toward it.

Joel, the character played by Tom Cruise, is in the “Future Enterprisers” club at school. He and his friends are, without exception, preoccupied with their hypothetical financial prospects as much as they are with their sexual ones. The two obsessions come together as Joel and sex worker Lana (Rebecca De Mornay) put their friends together for a party that yields thousands of dollars in one night and ends up getting Joel into Princeton after an admissions advisor shows up at the event. Brickman presents Lana similarly to how Jean-Luc Godard presented sex workers in the 1960s, as a starting point from which to examine the intersection between the economic and the personal; as both the product and the seller, she’s the ultimate capitalist symbol.

She’s not the first or last symbol the movie will use either, as Brickman layers many more into the narrative and lets them play off of one another. There are interesting parallels, for example, between Joel’s father’s Porsche and his mother’s Steuben egg, the shifting fates of which both comment on and determine Joel’s decisions. Again, so far so literary, but Brickman takes it a step further with a dreamy visual style and soundtrack that feel counterintuitive in theory but work beautifully in practice. While most of the other teen sex comedies of the era have virtually no visual expressiveness to speak of — “Porky’s” has all the texture of a documentary on strip mining — “Risky Business” creates an almost entirely new and singular form of filmmaking.

Film critic Dave Kehr, who contributed the excellent liner notes to the Criterion release, defines Brickman’s tone as haunting, lyrical satire, and it’s a good way of getting at the film’s unique relationship between style and script. Brickman separates “Risky Business” from “Porky’s” and its progeny right from the film’s opening in a scene that would be an utter cliche if not for its visual representation and ultimate outcome. After the opening credits, the movie begins on Joel discovering a neighbor naked in the shower; she invites him to join her, but when he tries to enter, he emerges in a classroom where he’s late for a test — the whole thing has been just a dream.

While the voyeuristic quality of Joel discovering the young woman echoes the famous “Porky’s” set piece in which the guys spy on the girls’ locker room, it couldn’t be more different in both conception and execution. The opening scene clearly and concisely establishes the movie’s link between sexual and economic anxiety (the test Joel is late for will, we are told, ruin his college prospects and thus his future livelihood), but it also establishes a tension between surrealistic, eerie imagery (and sound) and the movie’s naturalistic suburban landscape.

Beginning the movie with a dream allows Brickman to introduce a subjective, impressionistic, and elliptical visual grammar — and developing his ideas from an accessible premise not all that different from other ’80s sex comedies ensures the audience will stay on board even as the style of the movie goes in some rather audacious, even avant-garde directions. Throughout “Risky Business,” Brickman deftly employs shifting perspectives and a variety of aesthetic devices (slow-motion, step-printing, a hypnotically repetitive synth score by Tangerine Dream) to both intensify our identification with Joel and undercut his aspirations; we’re seduced by all of his and the film’s fantasies — of making money, of making love — at the same time that the style is subliminally telling us that none of it is real.

The fascinating thing about “Risky Business” is that the evocative, unsettling visual style and sound design — which have more in common with Kathryn Bigelow’s horror film “Near Dark” than any comedy — don’t work against the laughs. Everything else aside, this is a movie about teenagers wanting to get laid, and every joke on the topic (with many delivered by Curtis Armstrong in an all-time great comic performance) lands with impeccable timing. It’s one of the reasons “Risky Business” was a massive hit: It actually delivered everything someone looking for a more routine teen sex comedy would want.

Like “Dirty Harry” and “The Graduate” before it and “Fight Club” and “American Beauty” after it, “Risky Business” slyly operates in contradictions. It’s highly likely that many of the viewers who turned “Risky Business” into a hit in 1983 completely missed Brickman’s indictment of soulless consumerism (best embodied in that Steuben egg, an object that costs a fortune but does nothing and serves no discernible purpose) and saw Joel’s transformation into a successful pimp as an aspirational tale — just as a generation of stockbrokers would look to Gordon Gekko in “Wall Street” as a hero rather than the villain Oliver Stone intended.

Brickman himself was frustrated by the studio’s pressure to add a “happy” ending that he felt undercut the movie’s more corrosive qualities, and the Criterion edition provides the opportunity to watch “Risky Business” in both the theatrical cut and with Brickman’s preferred conclusion. At the risk of siding with the corporate overlords whose values “Risky Business” indicts, the studio-mandated finale seems more in line with the tensions that Brickman develops throughout the film. Brickman’s protestations aside, there’s nothing really upbeat about the theatrical ending — does anyone who thinks about it for more than five minutes really envision any kind of future for Joel and Lana? — and without it, the delicate balance between fantasy and reality, seduction and repulsion, and surrealism and social commentary that Brickman has so flawlessly calibrated throughout the film falls apart.

What makes “Risky Business” so enduring and provocative are the ambiguous and ambivalent qualities generated not only by Brickman’s camera but by every element of the film. Rebecca De Mornay’s performance, for example, is astonishing in its refusal to push too far in any one direction and sentimentalize or judge or apologize for Lana. When she tells Joel that she wasn’t involved in a plot to steal the money he made at their party, it’s equally plausible that she’s telling the truth and that she’s lying, and the whole movie operates at this kind of dual level.

Given the number of scenes with Joel waking up or that take place in his bedroom, one could even argue that the entire movie is a dream, or that some parts of it are. Brickman’s more conclusively downbeat resolution breaks the spell, though it’s great to have it on the Criterion disc for historical purposes. (I will also freely admit that perhaps my objectivity about this is skewed, having known and been in love with the theatrical version of “Risky Business” for 41 years — maybe I’m just too used to it to see the merits in Brickman’s initial edit.)

In an interview on the UHD, producer Jon Avnet implies that Brickman’s battles on “Risky Business” drained him of his passion for filmmaking, and it’s one of the great tragedies of film history that he only directed one more feature. That film, the 1990 drama “Men Don’t Leave,” is just as great in its own way as “Risky Business,” and has a lot of parallels with Brickman’s debut even though the genre couldn’t be more different. “Men Don’t Leave” is essentially a modern riff on the kind of “woman’s weepie” Joan Crawford or Bette Davis would have starred in during the 1930s or 1940s, a melodrama about a woman (Jessica Lange) whose life is forever altered by the accidental death of her husband.

Just as “Risky Business” takes the raw materials of the teen sex comedy and turns them into art, “Men Don’t Leave” deals with material that could be mere soap opera in less talented hands and transforms it into a deeply moving portrait of a family falling apart and reassembling. The most intriguing aspect of “Men Don’t Leave” is how similar the style is to “Risky Business” even though it serves completely different ends. Once again, there’s a blurry line between reality and the imagination, though here it is less about dreams than ethereal, fragile memories; once again, objects serve as rich metaphors, though here (as in a pickup truck that belonged to the dead husband) they’re more poignant than satirical.

And once again, Brickman creates a kind of visceral dream state through his images. The cinematography in “Men Don’t Leave” comes from Bruce Surtees, the final director of photography on “Risky Business” after Brickman burned through several cameramen with whom he could not find common ground. Surtees did most of his best work for director Clint Eastwood on movies like “Play Misty for Me” and “Sudden Impact,” films drenched in blackness that mirrored the grim moral universes in which they took place; few directors would make him their first choice when shooting a teen comedy, or a family tearjerker, for that matter. Yet his collaborations with Brickman are easily his best non-Eastwood pictures, precisely because his noir-inflected sensibility brought such an unexpected texture to them.

That Brickman could apply essentially the same visual and aural principles to one movie designed to elicit ironic laughs and to another designed to generate sincerely earned tears and have both films be equally effective speaks to the intangible nature of what filmmaking is all about and why it works. It’s also a testament to his incredible skill and force of vision and makes one wonder what Brickman’s career would have been like had he been willing to deal with the industry’s headaches. Would he have gone through every genre, applying the Brickman touch the way Robert Altman told every story in his distinct and specific way regardless of subject? Would it have worked every time as well as it worked in “Risky Business” and “Men Don’t Leave?”

We’ll never know, of course, but the Criterion edition of “Risky Business” provides some clues in the form of its excellent supplements, some ported over from an earlier Warner Bros. release and some brand new. In addition to insights from Brickman himself on a commentary track and making-of documentary, there are illuminating interviews with collaborators like producer Avnet, casting director Nancy Klopper, and editor Richard Chew, all offering insight into their collaborations with Brickman that go a long way toward demystifying his working methods. (Perhaps most instructive are the various explanations of how Brickman was influenced by Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Conformist.”)

The real value in Criterion’s disc, however, comes from the movie itself, presented in a new transfer supervised by Brickman and Avnet that showcases every detail in the meticulously composed frames and thoroughly immerses the viewer in the mesmerizing score and sound design. “The dream is always the same,” says Joel in the film’s opening voiceover, but 41 years after its release, the strength of “Risky Business” is that repeat viewings always yield new discoveries. It’s frustrating for those of us who revere Brickman that he never made more movies, but he didn’t really have to; the two he directed provide endless pleasures all on their own.

The Criterion Collection special edition 4K UHD disc of “Risky Business” will be released on July 23.