Time passes, but poignancy won’t

IT’S endlessly tempting to use our favorite films to sum up the decades in which they were made. In the case of the reissues Tuesday of two such likable minor classics as “Breaking Away” (1979) and “The Fabulous Baker Boys” (1989), the temptation’s even stronger, because each is rich with what reviewers like to call “humanity.” You can’t really pin either film down to being a sociological snapshot of a certain time. Rather, each translates its humanity into a close-focus sense of how the big-picture “issues” -- class and coming-of-age conflicts in “Breaking Away,” the trials of fraternal jealousy and competition in “Baker Boys” -- are made dramatically personal in the hands of gifted filmmakers.

An interesting side note on both the earlier film, written in an autobiographical vein by Yugoslavian immigrant Steve Tesich and directed by Peter Yates, and the one released a decade later by writer-director Steve Kloves, is that each represented a career highlight for the creators, and in several cases, for the stars.

In “Breaking Away,” we live a transformative summer with a quartet of recent Bloomington, Ind., high school grads, who keep returning for swims -- and crucial scenes -- to the quarry hole that’s a byproduct of the local stonecutting industry (thus they’re “Cutters” to themselves and the snotty fraternity crowd from the local university).

For a film that grossed under $17 million, it’s etched all four young men into a surprising, continuing status as household cinema legends. Dennis Quaid’s post-glory-days quarterback, Daniel Stern’s goofy Cyril, Dennis Christopher’s Italianophile bike racer Dave, and Jackie Earle Haley’s Moocher (yes, the Oscar-nominated dark presence of “Little Children” is touchingly empathetic here 27 years before) make a nimble, heart-winning ensemble under the sure direction of Yates.

The nearly magical accomplishment of tone by Yates here was to allow Paul Dooley, as Dave Blase’s used car salesman dad, and Barbara Barrie as his June Cleaver-with-a-twist mom, to greatly amuse us with small things. Dooley knows Tesich has served him some juicy curmudgeon dialogue, and lets Dad show a droll self-awareness with such lines as “No, I don’t feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky I’m not dead. There’s a difference.” Steadily balanced between the comic and the poignant -- Cyril sums that feeling up with, “I thought that was the whole plan, that we were gonna waste our lives together” -- “Breaking Away” forthrightly bikes toward an inevitable feel-goodness that doesn’t take all the sting out of what we realize: These cutters will always be scorned by the wealthier frat boys and shadowed by their own self-doubt. The film fully earns its stature as an enchanting parable of family, friendship and unpretentious fun.

“Baker Boys” came seemingly out of nowhere at the end of the Reagan years to inhabit a place out of time, where Jeff Bridges does what was then a surprising (we hadn’t yet realized the breadth of his acting command), Robert Mitchum-style turn in a story of familiar elements (showbiz guys on the road and The Girl who breaks their shared rhythm) that manages to be fresh. The interplay between Jeff Bridges’ emotionally remote Jack Baker and Michelle Pfeiffer’s streetwise chanteuse is noir-ish with an extra coating of lost-innocence grit. “Jesus, you’re cold,” she tells him, “You’re like a “... razor blade.”

“Once the sweat dries,” he spits back in a cruel reference to the lovemaking the emotionally damaged Susie had been so afraid to indulge in, “You don’t know ... about me.”

What to say about the red dress on a piano-top version of “Makin’ Whoopee” with which Pfeiffer stops the show and bewitches her hard-to-touch accompanist? What one forgets is that she also nails her audition (“More Than You Know”) and even after deriding it and causing Beau Bridges’ Frank to shout “ ‘Feelings’ isn’t parsley!,” briefly reanimates that shopworn ode. Susie calls the last cigarette she fishes out of her purse a “lost soul,” but in Kloves’ hard-to-top directing debut (he’s doing just fine as a screenwriter on four “Harry Potters” thus far), three lost souls just might find redemption. Like “Breaking Away,” it’s some of the best corn you’ll ever taste.