For Keeps?

One of the "Stars of the Month" last summer on TCM was not a traditional star, but "Ladies of the 80s". One of the movies that I hadn't heard of before was For Keeps?. Since the synopsis sounded interesting, I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it.

In an aspirational-class part of Kenosha, WI, Darcy Elliot (Molly Ringwald) is a high-school student hoping to become a journalist and living with her single mom Donna (Miriam Flynn). Darcy is about to go off to the University of Wisconsin for a weekend to meet with people about her journalism work, but what Mom doesn't know is that she's being taken there by her boyfriend Stan Bobrucz (Randall Batinkoff).

Stan is a good kid who is hoping to get a scholarship he's applied for at Caltech, where he's going to study to become an architect. That's something his father (Kenneth Mars) has wanted for him. Dad owns a shoe store which has done a good enough business to provide a reasonably nice house although none of these people are wealthy. But Stan works part time at the family business and Dad wants better for Stan and the two younger kids, who are also stereotypically bratty and obnoxious).

Stan and Darcy being teenagers, they have all sorts of hormones flowing through them, which means they also have a desire to have sex. So on the way to Madison, the two stop and set up Stan's design for a tent with a sort of window in the roof, and make love there. Darcy has been taking birth control, not because any of the adults know she's sexually active, but because she has out-of-balance hormones that are being regulated through the Pill. If you watch any old movies, however, you know that it's only going to take the one time of having sex, and....

Darcy has no period for a couple of months, which is how she's certain she's pregnant. She's not certain what to do, in part because Mr. Bobrucz is a devout Catholic for whom abortion is an absolute no-no. Darcy's mom has been thinking for a long time -- and saving up for -- a mother/daughter trip to France, and dammit, not even a pregnancy is going to stop that, who cares what Darcy thinks. And then there's the question of how the two of them are going to be able to finish high school, let alone go to college, a question which only gets worse when Stan's father wants to disown him.

So Stan and Darcy decide that they're going to show everybody that all of the stereotypes are wrong, and that a young couple like this can make it and keep the baby. They get married and take extra jobs as well as eating into their savings to get a place of their own, with Darcy eventually going to night school instead of regular high school so that somebody will always be there with the baby. However, there are still a ton of challenges for such a young couple, and everything works against the two of them, even threatening to destroy the marriage. However, the parents mostly soften their hard edges at least a bit. That may not be enough.

For Keeps? has a plot that sounds like it should be a serious drama, although the movie is intended to be closer to comedy than drama. Not that the subject matter can allow for a film like this to be straight comedy, of course. For the first two-thirds of the movie, it does a mostly good job of being mostly a comedy with some drama mixed in. But around the point where the marriage between Stan and Darcy starts failing, For Keeps? seems to lose its way a bit. It's as though the screenwriters had written themselves into a corner and didn't really know the best way to write themselves back out of it, making the last section of the movie somewhat of a mess. It's not that For Keeps? is a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination; it's more that it feels like something is missing at the end.

Still, For Keeps? is an interesting take on a tough topic, and the way people thought about it back in the 1980s.