Very rarely does one find a low-budget movie breaking into the mainstream. In this sense, BREAKING AWAY does indeed break away from the pack. It is obviously very low-budget, having been filmed largely in one area.

Set in Bloomington, Indiana - the home of Indiana University - BREAKING AWAY stars four boys who have been pals since childhood: Moocher (Jackie Earle Haley), Mike (Dennis Quaid), Dave (Dennis Christopher) and Cyril (Daniel Stern).

Moocher is the shortest of the bunch, and resents continually being called "shorty." Mike absolutely despises all the wealthy out-of-towners that stay only a few years in his beloved Bloomington. Cyril just didn't impress me as having that much of a personality, but was more of a hanger-on.

It is Dave and his mother (Barbara Barrie) and father (Paul Dooley) that form the centerpiece of the film. Dave, a cycling enthusiast, has a thing for all things Italian. He is able to persuade his mother - who is blissfully oblivious to all of his faults - to go along with him, but his father, a used-car salesman with a slick line, is about as xenophobic as they come. He even objects to the name of their cat, Fellini, preferring to call the cat Jake. (I mean, this father believes that zucchini is an Italian dish because it ends in -ini, and refuses to let his wife cook this vegetable.)

Dave tries, unsuccessfully, to win the hand of Kathy (Robyn Douglass) by convincing her that he is an actual Italian immigrant in Bloomington to study at Indiana. In reality, he and his three buddies are what are known as "cutters," shorthand for "stone cutters," or people who work in the Indiana limestone quarries nearby. Even though these four boys do not themselves work in the quarries as cutters, they come from that heritage, which is how they got the nickname.

After losing both a bicycle race (because a competitor knocked his bicycle down with him on it) and Kathy (because he finally admitted he lied to her about where he came from), he is able to convince his four friends to get together and enter a local bike race with funding from a variety of sources. His father even mellows to his bike riding to the point of funding T-shirts for the four of them, labeled "cutters" because that's what they call their team.

That is arguably the worst part of BREAKING AWAY. The ending of the climactic race just falls apart, and also feels contrived, as colleague Brian Koller (and other Epinioners) rightly points out. In fact, in watching the ending, I was struck by how much it felt like a traditional Chicago Cubs come-from-ahead victory. There is no suspense at all in it, which is why I say I give away "major portions" of the plot. You can guess the ending easily based on what information I give away here in this review.

The other worst thing (yes, there are two "worst things" about this movie) is that the actor playing Moocher looks so much like Dennis Quaid that the two of them could have been identical twins (with one twin having significant health problems stunting his growth). In watching this in the theaters initially, I felt distracted by this; I knew the four of them were playing lifelong friends, and I was wondering why in the world they would trick me into thinking a couple of brothers were playing mere friends.

BREAKING AWAY starts slowly - very slowly, as if the writers had conspired among themselves to coat the script with blackstrap molasses fresh out of the freezer. I would have preferred to see it start with the four friends going right into the bicycling. I also felt that the xenophobia exhibited by Dave's father was unnecessary at best, and actually detracted from the movie in spots, largely because Paul Dooley treated his lines as if they were comedic rather than serious. Had he gone for a dramatic interpretation, they might have worked to provide the necessary protagonist-antagonist tension which makes a good film truly great in some instances. I didn't want to see a goofus sounding like a bigot; I wanted to see a real live bigot up there. I felt cheated.

In short, even though I know this film was nominated for an Oscar, I feel I can't recommend BREAKING AWAY for anyone.

Recommended:
No

Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children up Ages 8