If the 70’s brought on a wave of retroactive worship of the 50’s in reaction to Watergate, economic instability and presidential fallibility, the 80’s brought about a retro flashbacks to the 60’s in reaction to Cold War-related saber rattling and nuclear fears. Everything was suddenly beachy again, as a fetish for all things California, a fitness and bodybuilding craze and a fondness for the shore suddenly collided in a perfect storm of beach movies.
Not only did Where The Boys Are get another run (revamped as Where The Boys Are ’85), the Nerds hit Paradise, Frankie and Annette went Back to the Beach to lampoon themselves, and even Barbie crimped her hair and took up surfing lessons. There was even a Gidget revival!
The girliest of these nouveau beach movies is definitely 1988’s Satisfaction, which hoped to springboard Family Ties’ Justine Bateman into movie stardom…but instead exists today as a curio for Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts fans who want to see their favorite actors in early roles (in Roberts’ case, her first, and the last before Mystic Pizza won her the critical acclaim she needed to land her immortal role as Shelby in Steel Magnolias, which would eventually win her a best supporting actress nomination at the Oscars that would shoot her onto the A list).
The movie focuses on Jennie Lee (Bateman), who is sort of the ultimate Mary Sue fantasy dreamgirl. Not only is she the valedictorian of her graduating class, but she’s also the lead singer of her own all-girl band, and the pride and joy of her older brother, who has raised Jennie after the death of their parents. Required to support their younger siblings, they have an agreement: Jennie’s to go out and look for a job as soon as possible so he can complete his education in trade for his doing all of the work while Jennie finished her advanced studies, but she bargains him into a Faustian deal– before she’s forced to yoke herself to adulthood, she’ll have one blissful summer on a pier upon the Jersey Shore, playing with her band The Mystery. After losing their van to an unfortunate incident and hotwiring a replacement, then also replacing their keyboardist with a dude, the Mystery arrives on the shore with hopes of landing a gig and shaking things up for themselves permanently.
Charming their way into the good graces of club owner Martin (Neeson), the band finds themselves playing nights at his bar and spending their days in his beachside abode. In between, they deal with the ups and downs of encroaching adulthood.
While Jennie struggles between her burgeoning relationship with Martin and the possibility of his setting them up on a European tour (will Martin support her because of her talent or as a 'favor' because he loves her?), Jennie’s bandmates struggle with their own problems; bassist Daryle (Roberts) is boy-crazy and unabashed about it, and spends much of the summer having marathon sex sessions in the back of the band’s van with boyfriends from home and the shore. Lead guitarist Billie is a lonely, mock-philosophical drug addict whose strongest relationship is with Martin’s doberman pinscher guard dog Hamlet; drummer Mooch is a streetwise Noo Yawk tough who wears her leather jacket out to the beach and is very streetwise (she’s the one who boosts the band’s new van off the streets of Brooklyn); and Nickie the keyboardist stands back amiably and seems amazed to be surrounded by so many pretty women (he’s literally curtained off from the rest of the gang in the beach house’s sole bedroom-cum-living living area-cum-practice room via clever use of a bedsheet stolen right from Colbert and Gable’s ‘It Happened One Night’) until a last-minute romance springs up between he and Mooch.
It’s very, very easy to see why Satisfaction died a late-winter death at the box office and single-handedly destroyed Justine Bateman’s hopes for a movie career. The plotting is beyond horrible, with Mooch in particular getting the short shrift developmentwise – a shame, because Alvarado and Roberts provide the movie its only sense of star quality. The only character given an individual, definable goal is Jennie, who has to figure out if Martin’s using the band (and by extension, is romancing her) for free labor, and if he’s lying to her about the European gig. Billie’s drug subplot is horrendously handled: to hand out some spoilers:
WARNING: the spoiler zone is for the unloading of spoilers only
Billie is apparently addicted to prescription pills along with milder recreational drugs like pot. She becomes so alienated from the group that she eventually overdoses in an intentional suicide attempt slash cry for help, forcing the band to save her life by making her puke and dunking her, crying, into a cold shower. In the aftermath she's frank about the depths of her despair, and they in response vow to ignore the outside pressures distracting them from the band. Scene over. Not only is that hilariously psychologically unhealthy, apparently the love of her bandmates is enough to chill Billie out, because she suddenly becomes completely sober. I know drug withdrawal would be far too heavy a subject for a beach movie to explore, but that's a strong hint that the subplot shouldn't be in the movie in the first place.
/SPOILER
Bateman’s chemistry with Neeson is next to nonexistent, which makes the core pull of the movie a vacant black hole. And the movie’s musical fluffery is pretty embarrassing; it's hard to believe that a group that displays such little talent would have the music world at its beck and call after one magic summer. It doesn't help that we’re only treated to one original Mystery song, leaving us to presume that they've been sent off on a major tour of Europe to captivate large audiences with hopelessly whitebread covers of songs like Iko Iko. It’s all purely impossible mary sue fluff – and on that level it’s enjoyable, in a guilty pleasure way.
On the positive side, it’s awesome to see a character like Daryle exist onscreen. Unapologeticly hungry for sex and money, the movie makes a foolish mistake in pairing her back up with her ex-boyfriend, when we’d rather see her fly free. Alvarado’s Mooch is similarly colorful, spunky, punky – and similarly wasted in two-d romance that goes nowhere.
Satisfaction isn’t out to win an Oscar, but it also isn’t out to ruin your day. A bit of epic 80’s hair band fluff, it’s more Bananarama than Bangles, but on a rainy, boredom –clouded day it might just improve your evening.
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