Foxes (film)

Foxes is a 1980 American coming of age drama film directed by Adrian Lyne from a screenplay written by Gerald Ayres. The film stars Jodie Foster, Scott Baio, Sally Kellerman, Randy Quaid, and Cherie Currie. It revolves around a group of teenage girls coming of age in suburban Los Angeles toward the end of the disco era.

Foxes was theatrically released on February 29, 1980, by PolyGram Pictures. The film was Foster's penultimate major film appearance before taking a sabbatical from acting to attend Yale. It also marked the acting and directing debuts of Currie and Lyne, respectively. It received several positive reviews from critics and was a moderate box office success grossing $7,470,348 in North America. The film has attained a cult status and is often cited amongst the greatest teenage-centric films.

Plot
A group of four teenage girls in the San Fernando Valley during the end of the 1970s have painful emotional troubles. Deirdre (Kandice Stroh) is a disco queen who is fascinated by her sexuality, likes boys and has many relationship troubles. Madge (Marilyn Kagan) is unhappily overweight and angry that she is still a virgin. Her parents are overprotective, and she has an annoying younger sister. Annie (Cherie Currie) is a teenage runaway who drinks, uses drugs, and runs away from her abusive police officer father. Jeanie (Jodie Foster) feels she has to take care of them all, is fighting with her divorced mother, and is yearning for a closer relationship with her distant father, a tour manager for the rock band Angel.

The girls believe school is a waste of time, their boyfriends are immature, and that they are alienated from the adults in their lives. All four seem immersed in the decadence of the late 1970s. The only way for them to loosen up and forget the bad things happening in their lives is to party and have fun. Annie is the least responsible, while Jeanie is ready to grow up and wants to stop acting like a child. Jeanie is most worried about Annie and continually takes risks to try to keep Annie clean and safe. Annie's unstable behavior keeps everyone on edge, and finally leads to her death in an automobile accident.

Annie's death brings changes for the rest of the girls. Madge marries Jay (Randy Quaid), an older man who deflowered her, Deirdre no longer acts boy-crazy, and Jeanie graduates from high school and is about to head off to college. After Madge and Jay's wedding, Jeanie visits Annie's grave and smokes a cigarette. With a smile, she muses that Annie wanted to be buried under a pear tree, "not in a box or anything", so that each year her friends could come by, have a pear and say, "Annie's tastin' good this year, huh?"

Cast

 * Jodie Foster as Jeanie
 * Scott Baio as Brad
 * Randy Quaid as Jay
 * Sally Kellerman as Mary
 * Cherie Currie as Annie Mallick
 * Marilyn Kagan as Madge Axman
 * Kandice Stroh as Deirdre Tompkins
 * Lois Smith as Mrs. Axman
 * Laura Dern as Debbie
 * Robert Romanus as Scott
 * Adam Faith as Bryan

Reception
The film received an approval rating of 67% from 9 reviews of Rotten Tomatoes.

Noted film critic Roger Ebert gave the film a good review, writing: The movie follows its four foxes through several days and several adventures. It's a loosely structured film, deliberately episodic to suggest the shapeless form of these teen-agers' typical days and nights. Things happen on impulse. Stuff comes up. Kids stay out all night, or run away, or get drunk, or get involved in what's supposed to be a civilized dinner party until it's crashed by a mob of greasers.

The subject of the movie is the way these events are seen so very differently by the kids and their parents. And at the heart of the movie is one particular, wonderful, and complicated parent-child relationship, between Jodie Foster and Sally Kellerman. They only have a few extended scenes together, but the material is written and acted with such sensitivity that we really understand the relationship. The film received several other positive reviews and earned $7,470,348 domestically.

DVD
Foxes was released in a Region 1 DVD by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on August 5, 2003. A Blu-Ray edition of the film was released by Kino Lorber on January 15, 2015.

Nominations

 * Young Artist Awards
 * Nominee: Best Young Actress Starring in a Motion Picture – Jodie Foster