There's something of a vogue these days in making your film look like it was made in the 70s (looking at you, Joker - of course that film was made in the 70s and it was called Taxi Driver (with a dash of King of Comedy) - but I digress), but I cannot imagine any new films being as successful in this regard as this one, whose beginning, with very basic period-specific versions of the "a ____ Film" bits that begin every film, along with the crackle and flicker of real film going through a projector, instantly put me in the drafty confines of the Wellesley Cinema (I half expected a Pearl and Dean announcement). The mood continues into the film, with drab muted colors (the wintry setting helps) and a sparse, 1970-specific soundtrack. If it had been announced that this was a lost Hal Ashby film I would have believed it instantly, as it has a definite Harold and Maude (yes, there's a Cat Stevens song on the soundtrack)/The Last Detail vibe (and as you can see, they've even made the poster look period-authentic). Indeed, the film is set in late 1970, specifically the Christmas break at Barton Academy, a posh New England boys' school. Paul Giamatti (with a distracting fake wall-eye)
plays an initially very Wilt-like Paul Hunham, who attempts to teach the little (although many of them tower over him) Visigoths classical history and is generally reviled for his savage grading and somewhat pungent odor. We first see him in his little suite of rooms tut-tutting as he covers their finals with red ink, puffs away on his pipe and imbibes some strong liquor. His reverie is interrupted, to his annoyance, by a very friendly lady, Miss Crane,
dropping off some Xmas cookies. Next we see him returning those finals (with grades ranging from F and F+ to the dizzy heights of B+) to his class of entitled teenagers on the last day of class.
After a chorus of dismay at how these grades will bring their parents' wrath down on their heads, he offers them the concession of a post-break makeup final, but it must be on new material (on the Peloponnesian War). In between these two Hunham events, we are introduced to some of his students in their dorms: the oikish and punchable Teddy Kountze and the gangly standoffish loner Angus Tully (the recipient of the B+). Tully is looking forward to vacationing in St. Kitts, to Kountze's clear annoyance, as he is to be one of the very few "holdovers," who has to stay at the school over the break. And watching over them, despite it not really being his turn (the teacher whose turn it is is getting out of it by claiming his mother has Lupus, which deceives exactly nobody, but Hunham wouldn't be leaving the school anyway...) is Hunham. And we see him explaining to four glum faces (Kountze, the school quarterback, whose father is a helicopter magnate, and is being required to stay rather than go skiing because he refuses to cut his hair as per that father's demands,
and two younger children, both Mormon, one Korean). Cut to Tully, waiting outside the school for his parents to show up, when he is called inside for a phone call. Because, of course (his face being on the poster), he is not going home. His mother's excuse is that she hasn't had a proper honeymoon with her new husband and this is to be their time. Tully is understandably distraught, and reminds her that he also wanted to take a detour via Boston, for reasons that only become clear much later in the film. Anyway, the next fifteen minutes or so of the film involves some badinage among the three older boys and the two younger (where we see the sympathetic side of Tully as he comforts the Korean boy after an "accident" in his bed, and more boorishness from Kountze, who is racist and a bully to add to his sins) (memorable moment: Tully waxing lyrical to the white Mormon kid after Kountze throws one of his mittens in the river that the worst part is that the other one has been orphaned) until, one day as all are "studying" (Tully surreptitiously looking at a porn mag) a helicopter flies overhead, and the quarterback delightedly exclaims that he knew his father would cave, as he's a softy. (There's a nice callback at the end of the film, the next time we see him in passing he has cropped hair.) The quarterback is an amiable doofus and offers a ski holiday to everybody, which they are happy to accept, except... Hunham can't get through to Tully's parents. So, lacking permission, both of them (and our third main character, the school cook and single mother to the most recent graduate to die in the service of his country, Mary (Da'Vine Joy Randolph,
whom I knew as the irascible detective in Only Murders in the Building)) are still stranded, and Tully is twice let down by his parents. Well, his mother and step-father, because his father, he blurts out in an argument with Hunham shortly afterwards, is dead. And thus the real film begins. And what makes this film so satisfying is that the three characters evolve organically: there is no sudden Scrooge-like conversion, where one character's view of another undergoes a 180 degree switch: all of them are wounded individuals who have no especial animus for the others, but just have to break out of their own wallowing to enjoy what the others have to offer. Incidents include: a shoulder-dislocation, leading to some inspired lying, a visit to a local bar (and a discovery about Miss Crane), a disastrous (for some, exciting for one) party, a Christmas meal,
and, taking up a sizable chunk of the last third of the film, a road trip to Boston (and Roxbury, for Mary), with bowling, ice-skating,
bookshopping (and prostitute rebuffing - with a memorable use of "candy cane"),
bringing revelations galore, about Tully's father and Hunham's past. But then, just when you think everything's rolling to a gentle conclusion, with school back in session, there's a final kink in the road that is handled in a way that is bracingly non-saccharine (and a memorable use of the phrase "penis cancer"). All in all, a wonderful little film, with a superb script, a character in Hunham that many an educator will find much with which (painfully) to identify and that is beautifully brought to life by the never-better Paul Giamatti. (And the other two principles don't put a foot wrong, either.) As Jami said, however, she didn't need to see it again, and I'm inclined to agree, at least for a few years. Some things are a little too close to the bone. Even if I don't have a box full of copies of Marcus Aurelius's Confessions to hand out as gifts.
No comments:
Post a Comment