Curly Sue (1991)

John Hughes closed out his directing career with a Depression-era fable relocated to 1991 Chicago, in which a homeless con man and his seven-year-old ward deceive a wealthy divorce attorney into housing them. The film runs on the assumption that poverty is best dramatized through the healing of the affluent. Bill and Curly Sue scam only for meals, which the screenplay treats as proof of moral standing. Walker, the sneering yuppie boyfriend, exists to be wrong about everything. The sentiment is applied with a trowel.

For a woman who earns her living dismantling marriages, Grey Ellison spends the back half of the picture being steered toward one. Her independence gets established and then promptly domesticated, which keeps the gender politics incidental instead of animating. The class material gestures at a critique of wealth and then dissolves into adoption papers and a wedding, capital forgiven by the closing credits. The film's divisions are economic, never racial; the cast is white throughout and no racial question is raised or acknowledged. Nothing here for the body-positivity ledger, nothing for neurodivergence, nothing environmental, nothing historical to revise. The preachiness is genuine but archaic: a warm, tearful insistence that we help the poor, delivered without a single statistic or slogan.

Critics at the time were split with unusual violence, Ebert finding heart where Siskel found grease. Both were describing the same object. Curly Sue is a machine for producing feeling, and it works on the audience least inclined to resist. As a document of social consciousness it is nearly blank, a relic of an era when the poor could be pitied without being theorized.