Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.0

Vision Quest Blu-ray Movie Review

Six Minutes on the Mat—and a Lifetime to Follow

Reviewed by Michael Reuben May 15, 2017

Writer John Irving was a huge fan of Vision Quest, Terry Davis' young adult novel about a high school wrestler, because Irving is a life-long wrestling fanatic, a former high school wrestler and coach, who routinely incorporates the sport into his own fiction (and cameos as a referee in the film version of The World According to Garp). Director Harold Becker's film adaptation of Vision Quest retains a devoted following among the sport's practitioners and fans, but that alone doesn't explain the film's modest success when it was released in 1985 or its continued popularity. The film benefitted from several happy accidents, including the appearance in a small role of a newly emerging singer, who, by the time the film was released, had exploded into the worldwide phenomenon known as Madonna. With her music video of the film's romantic ballad, "Crazy for You", playing almost hourly on MTV, Vision Quest received a massive PR boost.

Even leaving aside Madonna's involvement, Vision Quest is a time capsule of the early Eighties. Its rock-laden soundtrack is as evocative of the period as the more famous playlist of The Breakfast Club. The disarming directness and naivete of its farm boy protagonist reflect a more innocent time that was already fading into memory. The film enjoys the advantage of Becker's choice to shoot on location in the novel's setting of Spokane, Washington, giving Vision Quest a lived-in visual style distinct from the glossier fare that would soon dominate theater screens.

Vision Quest is the latest example of a Blu-ray released by the Warner Archive Collection in response to fan requests. Until now, the film has been poorly treated on digital media, with a 1998 DVD that was a quickie port of the pan & scan VHS master, followed by a burned-on-demand widescreen DVD in 2012. But now WAC has remastered Vision Quest to produce a home video version worthy of the film's enduring appeal.

Vision Quest recounts a few eventful months in the life of 18-year-old Louden Swaine, who is played by a then-24-year old Matthew Modine in what remains one of the actor's finest performances. After growing up in the country, Louden relocated to Spokane with his salt-of-the-earth father (Ronny Cox) when the family farm was lost to foreclosure and Louden's mother left. Already a star of the wrestling team at Thompson High School, Louden awakens on his birthday determined, as he says, to "make his mark" by challenging the state's top wrestler from neighboring Hoover High, Brian Shute (Frank Jasper), a merciless bruiser who is undefeated. To be matched against Shute, however, Louden has to drop almost twenty pounds from an already lean frame. Much of Vision Quest is devoted to Louden's increasingly agonized efforts to make the weight, which are depicted with a realism that continues to endear the film to wrestlers who have endured similar rigors.

A major distraction appears in the person of Carla, a tough-talking 21-year-old beauty from Trenton, New Jersey, whose presence in Spokane is such a plot contrivance that Becker wisely doesn't try to explain it; he just lets actress Linda Fiorentino inhabit the role with portents of the sizzling presence she would later bring to her star turn as a femme fatale in The Last Seduction (which is criminally absent on region A Blu-ray). In her first screen role, Fiorentino successfully breathes life into the cliche of an idealized and unattainable woman who is slowly won over by the fumbling hero's inner goodness. After Carla takes up temporary residence with Louden and his dad, the daily presence of what Louden calls "the girl of my dreams" causes the teenager even more pain than the ordeal of losing weight, with its blackouts and nose bleeds. But good things lie ahead.

The supporting cast is quietly impressive, giving flesh-and-blood substance to what might otherwise be trite stick figures. Loudon's best friend, Kuch (Michael Schoeffling, the object of Molly Ringwald's affection in Sixteen Candles), is Louden's temperamental opposite, who has assumed a Native American identity to cope with abuse by his alcoholic father (James Gammon, effective in a single scene). It's Kuch who dubs Louden's determination to confront an impossible foe a "vision quest". Meanwhile, Louden's wrestling coach (Charles Hallahan) and English teacher (Harold Sylvester) provide different forms of kindly adult oversight, while the school's resident smart girl, Margie Epstein (Daphne Zuniga, The Sure Thing), oohs and aahs over Louden's submissions to the school paper—but doesn't stand a chance with Carla in the picture. The late Roberts Blossom, who made a career out of playing old codgers, appears as Louden's backwoods grandpa, an avatar of the pioneering spirit to which Louden looks for inspiration. When it comes time to deliver the requisite inspirational speech required in every sports-themed movie, the task falls to Louden's boss at his after-school job, a short-order cook named Elmo (J.C. Quinn), whose outburst of eloquence is all the more effective because it's so unexpected. Madonna appears as a singer performing at a local club, but her screen time is less than that of future Oscar winner Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland), who plays one of many fellow wrestlers on Louden's team.

Vision Quest may be a coming-of-age story, but one of the keys to its appeal is that it's also a sustained exercise in wish fulfillment. Louden may suffer for his goals while experiencing intimations of mortality at a tender age, but when the dust settles and he walks away from the climactic wrestling match with a sports scholarship on the horizon, he's had an eighteenth year more joyfully memorable than most. Tales of growing up typically leave the hero sadder but wiser, but not in Vision Quest, where the hero gets (almost) everything he wants. What teenage boy wouldn't want to come-of-age like Louden Swain?

Vision Quest Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Vision Quest was photographed by the eminent cinematographer Owen Roizman, who began his career filming glossy commercials but acquired a reputation as a specialist in gritty urban realism after shooting The French Connection. The latter skill was well-suited to Vision Quest, which was filmed almost entirely in real locations that Roizman captured with a comfortably naturalistic texture and palette. For the film's Blu-ray debut, the Warner Archive Collection commissioned a badly needed fresh scan of an interpositive, which was performed at 2K by Warner's Motion Picture Imaging facility, followed by color-correction and cleanup. The resulting 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray may be somewhat controversial, because WAC has resisted the temptation (too often indulged by both filmmakers and technical crews) to give Vision Quest a contemporary digital makeover. The film has a grainy texture and an analog softness that WAC's presentation faithfully retains without sacrificing image detail. Blacks are accurate, but shadow detail in dark scenes is often lacking, which isn't a result of so-called "crush" (a term so misused that it ought to be retired) but of realistic lighting. The earth-toned palette is muted and understated, with the noteworthy exception of wrestling matches featuring strong overhead light and team uniforms in bright primary colors. It is certainly no accident that the official color of Louden's team is red and that bright reds follow him elsewhere (e.g., the waiter's jacket he wears for his job). It's a visual expression of the passionate nature for which he spends the entire film seeking an outlet.

WAC has mastered Vision Quest at its usual high average bitrate, here 34.99 Mbps, and the encode faithfully reproduces the film's analog quality without introducing artifacts.

Vision Quest Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Vision Quest was released in Dolby Stereo, and WAC has taken the soundtrack from the Dolby print master and encoded it in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. When played through a surround decoder, the mix remains largely front oriented except for the musical selections, which spread through the speaker array. The film's sound effects are relatively quiet, except for the wrestling scenes, both in training and in the climactic match, where sounds of bodies hitting mats (and each other) are often deliberately amplified. Occasional lines of dialogue are muffled, but this is a function of the original mix. By far the most notable element of the sound design is the generous selection of memorable Eighties tunes, including Journey's "Only the Young" (which opens and closes the film), Red Rider's "Lunatic Fringe" (which accompanies Louden's training) and, of course, Madonna's "Crazy for You" (which becomes the film's romantic soul). Incidental scoring was supplied by Eighties fixture Tangerine Dream (Miracle Mile and Risky Business), but there's very little of it, except during the final match.

Vision Quest Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The only extras are green band (1080p; 1.78:1; 1:30) and red band (1080p; 1.78:1; 1:40) trailers, which are nearly identical. That may not be much, but it's two more extras than the 1998 DVD had. (The video of "Crazy for You" could not be included due to rights issues.)

Vision Quest Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I'm not a wrestler, but I've always enjoyed Vision Quest, despite its pile of plot contrivances and character cliches. Like Louden Swain, it's an intensely sincere film—often foolish but always admirable in its youthful aspirations and idealism. WAC's Blu-ray gives the film a quality presentation that is long overdue. Highly recommended.