Most of Bennett’s theatrical works have an overly discursive quality, which would make them dry as a bone if his wit were not similarly desiccated. Hytner’s film adaptation labors to avoid seeming too studied and stagebound with an array of amateurish, unmotivated camera tricks, embarassingly clichéed montages, and pop hits from the ‘80’s. But even if Hytner’s talents as a film director are wanting, his cast’s energy is not, and it’s really the boys themselves that keep the film from seeming too much like a life-lesson from the Oracle of Leeds.
Plum roles abound in the film, and everyone seems to take to them aggressively. Predictable short-shrift is given to the quota-filling black and Muslim characters, but then a lot of the depth of the individual characters has as much to do with the actors filling the roles as Bennett’s writing of them. Three or four of the younger actors deliver standout performances, whether or not their characters are particularly interesting, and, not surprisingly, Richard Griffiths expertly fleshes out a character that is jolly, intelligent, blundering, and pathetic in a way that is far more interesting than Robin Williams in that other, ridiculous movie about learning. Griffiths makes Bennett’s erudite soliloquies on poetry, history, and the liberation of the liberal arts not only credible, but deeply moving.
Credible and moving, in spite of the fact that Bennett’s film has extremely complicated, rather preposterous, and mildly distasteful things to say about the platonic ideal of men teaching boys. Bennett (via Griffiths’ Mr. Hector) wishes to argue for a sensitivity and respect for the individual, the unusual, the marginalized, especially in the face of applications processes, curricula, programmatic learning, and all the other fascistic processes of reduction in modern education. But Bennett’s counterargument gambles wildly with Mr. Hector’s ball-fondling approach to teaching, a high-wire act that is at once too limited and too subtle. In spite of Hector’s hatred for the reductive, the film seems to contend that every male teacher has an erotic desire for his students. Perhaps this point is simply warped by the concurrent theme that history repeats itself, but in any case, the film’s larger thesis gets buried in Bennett’s apologia for man-boy love in the classroom. It’s admirably daring, but it simply doesn’t make sense. And as a result, Bennett comes off too much like Hector, the sad, old queen, his only support a cast of eager young boys, gamely willing to humor his odd ideas.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Fox Searchlight 35mm Print
13 Nov 2006 12:58 PM | Submit Comment
