The History Boys

THE HISTORY BOYS          A-                  

Great Britain  (104 mi)  2005  d:  Nicholas Hytner 

At a time when educational “values” seem lost in a politicized morass, when cultural debates have been reduced to either televised sound bites or talk radio where one side out shouts the other, when it all seems like such an obnoxious way to express oneself, along comes this delightfully insightful film about high school students that is filled with humor, intelligence and wit, that gets to the heart of the characters with their precise choice of words.  School funding has been steadily reduced, forcing cuts in programs such as the arts, which is really altering the cultural landscape of the country.  Everyone knows who sells $200 basketball shoes on TV, but are only vaguely familiar with any except the top-tiered writers.  To ask about painters or composers is simply unthinkable, as if these are age old arts, the kinds of things people studied before the invention of television.  How boring.  Then along comes this eminently appealing play captured on film using the same director and lead parts that scored London and Broadway stage success winning six Tonys, adapted by its author Alan Bennett for the screen, altering to some degree the play’s original emphasis. 

Using the classroom as the stage, we peek into the lives of some of the brightest kids in the working class town of Yorkshire, specifically 8 kids who scored so well on their college entrance exams that they actually have a good chance of getting into Oxford or Cambridge, the icons of British class and intelligence, and are taking an extra term just to prepare them for that possibility.  Not since Michael Winterbottom’s insightful 1996 film JUDE, an adaptation of the late 19th century Thomas Hardy novel Jude the Obscure, have the complexities of British thought, class, and education been explored with such relish and detail.  This film is a huge delight in large part driven by the same elements that made the play such a success—smart, witty, eloquent and precise language as well as the emotional development of character, featuring likeable kids who are undeniably appealing because of their outspoken honesty, especially their ability to express themselves so clearly, and their wonderful support of one another.  No shrinking violets among them, they’re each constantly aware of everything that happens around them, including each other’s business, spending hours of preparation each night, coming to class alertly aware of what’s expected of them, and in class they perform magnificently, offering lucid, well thought-out opinions, reciting literary passages, performing improvised dramatic skits in a foreign language, singing show tunes, including brief excerpts from movies or plays where their teacher has to guess the original source, like playing Stump the Band. 

The teachers are just as outstanding, featuring the jocular yet rotund Richard Griffiths as Mr. Hector, a brilliantly inspirational sixtyish renaissance man who exudes the very soul of knowledge, who plies the curiosity of youth with neverending quotes from poets of all ages, always finding the right turn of phrase to capture any given moment, and in one scene when he’s alone with just one student dissecting a passage from Thomas Hardy, the density of thought in that brief span of time borders on the sublime.  Frances de la Tour is a rock of Gibraltar, her demeanor never changing, offering her expertise on her subject of history, becoming brilliant at one point when suggesting a woman might be present at their college interviews, going on an eloquent description of history as a commentary on the “continuing incapabilities of men.”  The school headmaster (Clive Merrison) on the other hand, is a severely repressed, awards-driven administrator who thinks only of the image of his school, thinking the students themselves are too crass, but need special tutoring from a recent Oxford alum, someone who can shortcut their path to the promised ground.  Stephen Campbell Moore plays young Mr. Irwin, a brilliant student himself who distinguishes his argument by choosing the road not taken, believing no one disputes the truth, which is irrelevant, that all applicants agree on the same facts, so they need to learn how to play the devil’s advocate, take the position no one else would dare make, and in doing so, stand out in a crowd.  In the classroom, the young and the old are pitted against one another, leaving the students somewhat befuddled when it’s clear their methods are starkly at odds with each other. 

There’s a brisk pace to the film, wonderfully expressed with the musical selection of the Cure or The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah” as the kids are checking out books from the library, moments that might otherwise be sluggish or forgettable.  A continuing thread throughout the film are gay themes, with Mr. Hector being more open about it than the closeted Mr. Irwin, but also in the portrait of one of the students, Posner (Samuel Barnett), who can’t take his eyes off one of the other students, Dakin (Dominic Cooper), who is something of a hunk, the only student who regularly flaunts his sexual prowess.  One of the best scenes in the entire film is Posner’s heartfelt rendition of the song “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” Bewitched Samuel Barnett -The History BoysOST YouTube (3:12), emphasizing the male attraction in the lyrics, (“l sing to him, each spring to him, and worship the trousers that cling to him”), directing every line towards Dakin.  There’s also a beautiful epilogue segment, cast in a differering hue, portrayed with a kind of afterlife omniscience, as the kids sit around and reveal what careers they chose in their lives.  It’s an especially poignant scene that works only because of the steady build up of shared moments with each student, who are now intimately familiar to us.     

Dead Man Down

DEAD MAN DOWN              B-                   

USA  (110 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Niels Arden Oplev

Even the most damaged heart can be mended. Even the most damaged heart.       

—Darcy (Dominic Cooper)

Though he built his career on made-for-TV movies in Denmark, director Niels Arden Oplev made an international splash with his highly inventive take on the opening chapter of Stieg Larsson’s The Millenniun Trilogy, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2009), which also introduced a generally shattering performance by Swedish actress Noomi Rapace, also seen in Beyond (Svinalängorna) (2010), where in both performances she plays a bitterly angry survivor of childhood trauma.  In his first experience working in America with a budget that for this film alone may exceed all of his other films put together, featuring a terrific cast, the film is bound and determined to deliver the obligatory Hollywood explosive sequences, which have become so routine and standardized in American big budget entertainment that anything without it is likely called an indie film.  Something out of the revenge genre, this action thriller focuses on two emotionally wounded characters who have each survived a horrible ordeal, yet both have eyes on obtaining revenge, becoming not only obsessive but maniacally driven to exact their own brand of justice. Colin Farrell, where you’d have to go back to IN BRUGES (2008) to find a performance this stylishly intense, plays Victor, a Hungarian immigrant looking to establish a new life in America, but his wife and daughter were killed under mysterious circumstances, becoming a low level gangster for the corrupt mobster Alphonse (Terrence Howard) who had his family killed, where he is believed dead as well, but changed his identity.  Living on the same floor in the high rise building across the way is Beatrice (Noomi Rapace), where the two meet by strangely seeing one another from their respective buildings.  Beatrice is disfigured, especially on one side of her face, from an auto accident caused by a drunken driver that she continues to rage against with open hostility, as he only served three months in jail.  Living with Beatrice is her diminutive mother, Isabelle Huppert no less, speaking broken English and French, looking after her adored daughter by baking cookies, maintaining her good humor, and occasionally putting a smile on her daughter’s face.  Both are the kind of women who simply take over your life with a zest for living most of us are incapable of experiencing, where Beatrice opens Victor’s eyes when he wasn’t even looking. 

Using strange flashbacks that aren’t even initially understood, Victor repeatedly stares at his computer screen watching home videos of his wife and daughter, dead to the world in more ways than one as he’s completely unresponsive to most people, so his best friend is fellow gangster Darcy (Dominic Cooper), a nervous and  fidgety guy who’s also a nonstop blabbermouth given a second chance at life by his generously understanding wife and newborn, suggesting “even the most damaged heart can be mended.”  This understanding clicks in Victor’s brain, as he’s obviously on a circuitous route to hell and damnation, where he has his apartment set up as a surveillance lab, with tapped cellphones where he can hear every conversation within Alphonse’s inner circle and a secret room hidden behind the refrigerator that offers photos, memorabilia, and other clues about each of the gangland players, like a commemorative memorial, even though they are still alive.  This is an indication of Victor’s mindset, however, as in his head they are already dead.  Initially we think he may be a cop infiltrating this gang, watching every move they make, until eventually we realize the convoluted path this picture is taking by making Colin Farrell a one-man wrecking crew, a Rambo-like killing machine with designs on revenge.  When he finally meets Beatrice, her burning need for revenge is not so hard for him to understand, though the film reaches a hysterical level of anxiety when she blackmails him with cellphone video footage of him killing a man in his apartment, vowing to turn it over to the police unless he executes the driver who mangled her face.  Once you understand Victor’s detached emotional level is on par with Rambo, Sylvester Stallone as scorned Vietnam vet John Rambo in FIRST BLOOD (1982), the only decent one of the series, dead bodies are simply part of the playing field.  While Victor, still a young guy, claims he learned about guns in the Hungarian army, they haven’t exactly fought in any wars recently, so his moody seclusion with CIA-like skills on weapons, surveillance techniques, explosive devices, not to mention shooting skills with automatic weapons make him something of a man with a mysterious past.    

Written by J.H. Wyman, one of the feature writers of J.J. Abrams’ current sci-fi TV series Fringe (2008 to present), and shot by Paul Cameron, a co-cinematographer of Michael Mann’s COLLATERAL (2004), the film has a sophisticated, European arthouse look, with plenty of well composed shots from unusual angles, mixing dilapidated buildings, empty warehouses, and plenty of street action along with conflicting stories about gangland killings, mysterious letters with cryptic messages sent to Alphonse with only partially completed photos, where Alphonse initially targets who he thinks is behind it all, blowing away an entire detail of criminal drug operators in the process, which draws the ire of none other than mob boss Armand Assante, a legendary gangster figure and Emmy winner playing John Gotti, who has also been receiving the same letters, which couldn’t have been sent by anyone from his drug unit after they were already killed, sending him into a furious rage, where both men have to find a leak in their organization.  In a sequence out of SAW (2004 and counting), Victor has a bound and blindfolded hostage that he’s keeping in an abandoned warehouse, one of the Albanian killers that actually murdered his wife and child.  In fact, this guy has so many events going on at once, with his buddy Darcy continually blowing in his ear on his cellphone, filling him in on the latest developments, where most would be hard-pressed to keep track of them all, juggling a developing romance in between all his other gangster interests, all seemingly impossible, yet these various projects do amp up the intensity level, even if the viewer finds much of it preposterous.  But this typifies what passes for Hollywood entertainment, where men have to rise to the level of superheroes, showing the capabilities of Rambo, where a huge part of the appeal are the special effects sequences blowing things up and high risk, showdown moments of blowing people away.  With terrific acting performances on display throughout, including an interesting twist featuring the European talent of Rapace, Huppert, and Assante, not to mention a director that knows how to build suspense, the redemptive love interest of damaged souls may simply be too much, turning more existential, as there’s plenty more carnage yet to come.  Despite the unpredictable twists and turns, there are too many holes and improbabilities, including scenes that make little sense, left dangling in midair as if something significant was edited or left out, yet overall, as an action and psychological thriller with a fixation on revenge, the well developed characters keep things interesting.