Plot
In this coming-of-age story, Louden Swain (Matthew Modine) is a high school wrestler who has just turned eighteen and decided that he needs to do something truly meaningful in his life. Against the wishes of those around him, he embarks on a mission to drop two weight classes in order to challenge the toughest opponent, Brian Shute (Frank Jasper), a menacing 3-time state champion from nearby rival Hoover High School, who has never been defeated in his high school career. In his zeal to drop from 190 pounds to 168 pounds, against the wishes of his coach (Charles Hallahan) and teammates, he disrupts the team around him and creates health problems of his own.
Meanwhile, his father (Ronny Cox) has taken on a boarder named Carla (Linda Fiorentino) from Trenton, New Jersey, passing through on her way to San Francisco. Though she is older, Louden begins to fall in love with her and begins to lose sight of his goals as a wrestler. Worse, his drastic weight loss culminates in an unhealthy situation in which he gets frequent nosebleeds due, Louden claims, to a lack of iron in his diet (which costs him a match that he should have won). He and Carla finally admit their love for one another, but she realizes this is distracting him from his goals. She decides to move out and continue on to San Francisco, but not before seeing Louden's big match in which he defeats Shute in the final seconds with an over-under hip toss.
Read more about this topic: Vision Quest
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)