SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN: the growing pains of pre-Brat Pack life and love

In the interests of full disclosure I want to make one thing clear right from the start. I am not a member of this film's target audience. Even when I was in the target age range I was not in the target audience. SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN is a chick flick for females too young to have attained chickhood. It's the cinematic equivalent of young adult literature as written by Judy Blume.

My reason for watching is the film's star Jennifer Connelly. I've been an admirer of her charms ever since discovering them in 1991's 'Career Opportunities,' and SEVEN MINUTES was a film of hers that I'd not heard of before so I wanted to check it out. I was also intrigued by the synopsis which made it sound like a John Hughes style drama for teenagers just a few years too young to identify with his brat pack movies (SEVEN MINUTES was released in 1985, the same year as 'The Breakfast Club').
SEVEN MINUTES focuses on the struggles of three lifelong friends to maintain their friendship in the face of newly competing pressures from the opposite sex. Natalie (Connelly), Jeff (Byron Thames) and Polly (Maddie Corman) have always done everything together, but when Natalie starts dating the high school hunk that Polly has a crush on, jealousy threatens to shatter the childhood bonds.
While SEVEN MINUTES is no-where near as polished as 'The Breakfast Club.'  'Some Kind of Wonderful' or 'Pretty in Pink' there's still plenty to enjoy. The growing pains of first love are something most of us can relate to, and there's something very charming and almost quaint in watching teenagers negotiate these without the benefit of cellphones or the internet. It's fashion, however, that provides the most unexpected pleasure. I'd completely forgotten that the in look in the mid 80s, at least according to SEVEN MINUTES, was the chunky sweater. Almost every character is decked out in one of these shapeless monstrosities which do nothing for the figure and must weigh several pounds a piece.
15 year old Connelly gives a very self assured performance, and it's easy to understand why she went on to become an Oscar winning film star while her fellow actors vanished into bit part obscurity. This is a sweet but not sugary coming of age story that definitely deserves a higher profile than it has today.