Haven't we suffered enough?

Julianne Moore tries to convince Nathan Lane they make the script work.

The English Teacher (2013) is about a woman who mistakes a bad script for a good one.  But enough about Julianne Moore, let's talk about the character she plays in the film.

This woman reads nothing but great classical literature but somehow becomes convinced that the faux avant-garde playscript written by a former student is immortal art, the implication being that she is biased because the writer IS a former student.

It is possible that the writers of this film not only don't know any English teachers, but never had any English teachers.  Maybe they always cut class.  Most English teachers I know care for their students very much but start out with the assumption that whatever they write is going to be absolutely terrible and that the teacher must decide how and what is fixable before this writing is unleashed on an innocent public.  They do NOT begin with the premise that their former student's play is going to be a piece of genius, such that they walk around in a fog for WEEKS until they SUDDENLY realize that the play was crap all along.  I mean these people READ FOR A LIVING.  It's questionable whether the writers and producers of such drivel are literate at all.

This is also the kind of movie in which nobody notices that Julianne Moore is hot because she is wearing classes, and nobody notices that Nathan Lane is a pompous fraud because, well, actually, I have no idea why they don't notice that.  He virtually has it tattooed on his forehead.  (And why haven't Lane and his boss, played by Norbert Leo Butz realized that instead of running this crummy school, they should be co-starring in a HILARIOUS Broadway musical?)  Moreover we have to endure the movie-high-school-play-production cliche that the acting is terrible but the set, which is either beautiful or hideous, is in any event, completely professionally assembled, clearly painted by members of Local 829 of the United Scenic Artists who happen to still be attending high school.

Most insultingly, we are also subjected to the common Movie World idea that all of high school is permeated with a sweaty cloud of sex.  Now while a lot of our students may be walking around in that sort of funk, no faculty I have been a part of (and I have taught in rural, suburban AND urban settings) is anything but a bit ascetic.  Frankly, you can't survive in a school setting without a parental mindset.  Teachers call their students "my kids" partly because it's useful shorthand, but partly because there is some truth.  To a limited degree they are your kids.  You share responsibility for part of their lives.  Any teacher who does otherwise is dangerous and may even be psychologically unstable.

[UPDATE:  I've since heard an interview with the writers which implied that they had no intention of portraying real teachers, but reflecting a students-eye view of teachers.  That would have been nice if your screenplay had articulated that idea.  From what is on the screen, I can only presume that the script reflects the writers' own immature ill-formed ideas of who teachers are.  Look, kids, I never said teachers don't have illusions.  They do.  But somebody already made a GOOD film about a teacher having his illusions stripped away.  It's called ELECTION, it's adapted by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor from a very good novel by Tom Perotta and you should be required to watch it twenty times from beginning to end before you're allowed to try and write another script of any kind ever again.]

I've already spent more time, and wasted more of YOUR time on this thing than is worth it.  Much, much better films have come and gone without comment by me.  (But I'm working on catching up.  Really.  I am.)  But this is a milieu that I knew well.  That, in fact, MILLIONS of people know well and the sheer effrontery of preserving and rehearsing these destructive old cliches about schools and teachers is especially galling.

Still -- somewhere there's a movie co-starring Nathan Lane and Norbert Leo Butz waiting to be made.

Bravo pour le maitre

Georges Lopez and his youngest charges

The initial impulse of cinema verite as it was first defined in the sixties was to capture the world as it is, without artifice, virtually without a point of view.  Frederick Wiseman is the filmmaker most often cited as coming closest to that ideal, but while Wiseman doesn't narrate his films or state a thesis or deliver a canned conclusion, but he frequently lets his subjects go on at such length as to expose themselves as foolish, vain, misinformed or incompetent.  Wiseman seems to feel as though the purpose of documentary is to let the subject hang himself with his own words and acts.

Etre et avoir (2002) is not having any.  [The title was translated as, literally, "To Be and To Have" but that means nothing in English, whereas the words are the basic building-block irregular verbs of French.]  Interestingly, the film evidently began as a pedagogical exercise to document successful teaching techniques for the use of fellow professionals.  But filmmaker Nicholas Philibert found that his first subject, Georges Lopez, teaching in a one-room school in rural agricultural France was not only a maitre (the common French idiom for teacher) but a master.

What are his brilliant techniques?  What is the terminology for his instructional approach?  I have no idea.   We don't see any specific methods employed, other than the tried and true.  There is nothing for what teachers call a Professional Learning Community to chew over here.  The secret ingredient that makes Georges Lopez a great teacher?

Love.

This man loves his students like we're supposed to and often not permitted to.  He pays deep attention to each one, knows their foibles and strengths, praises them and chastises them, a true in loco parentis.  He is more than a master, he is a father, the father of our imaginations, almost endlessly patient, kind and firm.  He settles disputes, makes students keep promises, checks their work, reviews their assessments, and lets them play, imagine, draw and dream.

Lopez and the film that contains him is so serene, poised, balanced and beautiful that it should be prescribed for any emotional upset or disturbance.  A few minutes with M. Lopez, and no one could be distressed-- all is tranquility and peace.

The neutrality of the camera is a thing to behold.  There is a beautiful stillness to the empty classroom, but even with the kids in action, the camera holds back, never intruding, letting them be themselves.  There is a priceless bit of slapstick with two 6-year-olds trying to operate a large photocopy machine, as they go on and on trying to get the book set correctly on the glass, struggling to push the right button, keep the cover down, to little avail as they keep producing bungled copies, soldiering on nonetheless.

Philibert builds in no false drama.  The children will move up to the next grade, the next school in the usual way.  There are no confrontations with angry parents, no meetings with Lopez's superiors (spiritually, there are none), no extraordinary crisis.  (One child is counseled as his father goes through a terrible illness, but still part of the ordinary fabric of life, a context into which Lopez attempts to put these events for his distraught student.)

Following its own quiet ways, the film's climax comes at the end of the film, the end of the school year.  He and the children say their goodbyes, some for the summer holidays, some forever.  He is all reassurance and warmth.  And as the last one clears the threshold, Lopez suppresses the tiniest choking tear.  It's more moving than all the agony of the throbbing orchestral tones of Titanic.

Etre et avoir is a reminder of just how powerfully less can be more, in life and on film.

Mach One Mock Doc

This is the trailer for a partially improvised documentary about a year in the life of four public school teachers (and administrators) called Chalk (2006). I don't like to use trailers because they are not the movie and often contain things that are not in the film or distort the tone of the film. But this trailer is reasonably accurate and gives a sense of the upbeat deadpan tone of Chalk. Its immersive quality is reminiscent of Christopher Guest's films but at no time do the characters have the distance and occasional aloofness that sometimes visit the Guest films.

These teachers are not above the events in the movie -- they're not above anything. Neither are they caricatures or buffoons. Well, one is a buffoon, but the film is not out to be cruel. And never has the terrible yet sometimes rewarding experience of the first year of teaching been so well represented on film.

A real, grass-roots mockumentary like Chalk highlights how TV series like The Office and Modern Family, funny as they are, have bastardized the form they sprung from. Chalk uses only a handful of professional actors, filling out the cast with friends, family and real teachers and students. One of the funniest teachers, a seriously repressed neurotic, is played by the film's assistant director. None of the teachers is dishonest or contemptuous, or a lout. They are genuinely trying to do their best. Some are under-experienced, some are overworked, some lack perspective on themselves and one teacher is just not very bright. That happens, although not as often as politicians would have you believe. But they all want to do well by the students.

[I didn't see the Cameron Diaz atrocity Bad Teacher because I refuse to patronize a movie that says that a drunken lazy slut can become a teacher without any accountability. Sorry if I'm a little over-sensitive, but that just doesn't strike me as funny. What if they made a film about a drug-addled terrorist who became a uniformed police officer? Does that make any sense? Is it funny? Neither was Bad Teacher's premise.]

Chalk is unique for maintaining the teachers' points of view. Students do not become significant or notable characters. (This is not true in a teacher's working life, but they had to keep the thing down to 90 minutes.) This manages to defuse the traps of sentiment and melodrama that something like Up the Down Staircase was inclined to fall into.

But what I've failed to say is that not one minute goes by in this film that doesn't make you laugh. Or at least made me laugh. And some minutes much more than that. And its sincerity and lack of condescension make you feel as though you saw something when it was over, not just a string of gags and blackouts. I especially recommend this to my fellow teachers -- it is funny because it is very true. (Incidentally it is available on Netflix streaming until February when the Starz contract expires.)

HEAVEN is transcendent

The heroine is a would-be murderer who inadvertently becomes a terrorist and is overcome with grief and shame, the hero is a policeman who loves and pities her for her anger and shame, they hide and run and shave their heads and when they are hopelessly cornered, they disappear into a dot in the sky and it is impossible to describe the terrible loveliness of the strange film called Heaven (2002).

Heaven is directed by Tom Twyker, known to me for Run, Lola Run, which I have long highlighted in my own film courses for its alternate timelines (including flash-forwards) and its brilliant use of a pounding, relentless music score (not to mention crazy animation and some insanely red hair on the heroine which always helps).

Heaven is conventional chronologically speaking, and yet it feels even more like a fable than Lola. In place of Lola's relentless techno, there's the ethereal sound of Arvo Part. Where Lola pounded through the streets, Twyker's camera seems to float high above the characters and the story. (It doesn't--it only seems to.) The illustration above, of the two lovers in their first and perhaps only bout of lovemaking, illustrates the lengths to which Twyker's team went to achieve the pictorialism of the film.

One commenter described it as a love story disguised as a thriller, one of those pieces where you can't seek justice from the authorities because they are the source of the injustice (in this case, a policeman who runs a drug ring). Yet it surrenders potential thrills (though not surprises) almost at once. It starts with cold hard facts of where and when and who and how and gradually sheds them like a lover joining her partner in a warm bath. It's one of the those films that doesn't always tell you what it's doing and where it's going, but because you sense its sureness, you're content to go with it. And the last 10 or 15 minutes of the film are practically speaking, probably impossible--the final image literally is. The narrative is not so much a matter of "what would happen if..." as it is "what happens to love, to loyalty, to space and time when..."

It reminds me of Ford's Wagon Master in that narrative takes second place to contemplation and reflection, to image juxtaposed with image, to what film historians call "poetry." This might seem like a contradiction to my post about The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Let me clarify--it's not that narrative is the prime value of film. But it is a significant device to draw the audience into the shop so they can see your other goods. A little while back I wrote a play in which I wanted to make some satirical points about our schools and the testing and accountability ethos today. I found the way to make it engaging to the audience was to build a romantic triangle on top of a con-man story, with the satire peeping through. That romance was not central, but it was the engine that maintained the attention of my auditors. Heaven has just enough of "what will happen now" to keep the audience with it all the way to its very metaphysical end, as contrasted with Imaginarium which appears to flaunt a complete lack of interest in events in favor of a rococo pictorialism.

If this post seems more vague and less analytical than usual, Heaven is a hard film to analyze on a single pass. I will need to revisit it. You could do worse than one pass yourself.

Exciting 50-year-old newcomer

I can't imagine what new thing I could add to the conversation about Precious (2009) at this late date, especially as a human or social document, of which it is a profoundly powerful example. So I will confine myself to a couple of strictly film-oriented observations and urge you to see if it you haven't.

A note about that. I suspect many people avoided the film, as I did, because it looked like one of those ponderous downer indie films. And the marketing emphasized the suffering of the main character and never revealed her transcendence. When you see a trailer or an interview for The Blind Side, you can't miss the fact that it's all going to turn out OK, that, in fact, you're going to feel great when the film is over. The marketers for Precious didn't do that, and as well as the film did, I can't help suspecting it had blockbuster potential if it had been positioned more astutely.

The film has some of the most beautiful and thoughtful framing and staging in a long time. I looked for a long time without success for a screen grab of my favorite shot in the film--again, the publicists have limited themselves to a handful of pictures, mostly showing lead actress Gabourey Sidibe scowling. It happens when Precious arrives for her first day of classes at the alternative high school and the language teacher, Ms. Rain saunters into the hall for a soda. The camera remains stationary, keeping both the foreground chair Precious is sitting in and the hall which recedes toward the classroom in focus. The teacher invites Precious to join the class, but Precious, who has just vomited up her gobbled-down breakfast, doesn't move. The teacher walks partway back, but out of Precious's line of sight. And she leans on the wall, waiting. Precious still sits sprawled. At the moment, each is in their own sphere, hovering on the brink of connecting. And director Lee Daniels has the sense to let us have a moment to contemplate that.

A moment later, Precious will take the steps to change her life and as she does, there is a blinding white light, which settles into the warm, brown inviting tones of the classroom. It is impossible to miss this is a milestone.

The transitions into Precious's fantasies are all marvelous and inventive, especially for this old trope (I mean the troubled youngster escaping into fantasy.) There are two uses of special effects in the movie and both of them are dazzling. At one point, Precious looks through a cross-shaped window in a door and the camera moves through it to a digital snowstorm against black and then we move to the next scene. I don't know what it meant, except that it connects all these separate realities. Then later, in the halfway house, Precious looks out the window and sees a young man on a motorcycle who could conceivably be a boyfriend (she's never had one). And the stones in the asphalt of the street glitter like stars until we fade into reality. That should have seemed silly, laughable, but it is profoundly expressive.

One quibble--one day Precious is barely writing intelligible words. A few movie minutes later (it is supposed to be months later) she is winning an award for her poetry. It stretches credulity, but it wouldn't have stretched it if we could have heard some of that poetry, which would also have given us more detailed insight into Precious's inner growth.

Finally, the director has to be credited with the high level of acting in the film, given that only one of the principals (Paula Patton) is a full-time, trained actor. The rest, newcomer Sidibe, Mo'nique, Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz, Sherry Shepherd come to acting from other places, most from other types of performing which call on them to project the best, most likeable version of themselves. Obviously, that was not what they were called upon to do in Precious, but everyone delivers superbly, right down the line. Think of the climactic scene between Sidibe, Mo'nique and Mariah Carey--a scene which seasoned pros would find intimidating. These three neophytes breezed through it like nothing.

This could indicate the skill of the director; his good sense and judgment in making and cultivating friends (which is how he cast many of the non-actors); or that they didn't know to be afraid of a scene like that because they lacked experience. A hard scene was just as hard as an easy scene, and vice versa. But it also says something about film acting. It only has to be done once. It could be argued that the only reason an actor needs technique is in order to be able to repeat a performance, whether for different audiences in the theater or for different takes in the movies. If you only have to do it once--and in these days of digital photography, it makes sense to shoot with multiple cameras to get coverage--perhaps all that is required is some intelligence, sensitivity and imagination, and the old virtues of technique are less important. It's happened before--think of Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives or Oprah Winfrey in The Color Purple--but I can't think of another movie so thickly populated with fine performances by non-actors.

If Lee Daniels weren't already past 50, I would say he was a youngster to watch.

Great Movie Teachers

I wrote a post at my other blog, Kerrikulum, about the best movie teachers ever. I was guided by educational criteria, not aesthetic judgments about motion pictures, but it might be of interest.