Closely based on the play (which I have not seen), this is set in the recent past and follows the experiences of a group of 7 or 8 boys at a British grammar school as they spend a semester studying for the Oxford and Cambridge University entrance exams. This was a curiosity of British education, now abolished, that involved students spending an extra semester at school to take specialized exams for Oxford and Cambridge, because those two universities claimed that the regular final exams (A levels) did not adequately test for what they were wanted in an undergraduate. The main theme is conflict between the gaining of knowledge for its own sake, and learning in order to pass the exam. The former is symbolized by the old History teacher, Hector, and the latter by a new teacher, Mr Irwin, brought in by the headmaster to increase the number of the school’s students who go to Oxbridge (one of the primary status symbols by which schools are judged). The very different approaches are on display as the two teachers prepare the boys for the exams and interviews, with Hector encouraging singing, soulful discussions of poetry and the First World War, and using one’s French to pick up prostitutes, while Irwin tells the students to choose the topics they write about and their favorite hobbies and composers strategically in order to impress the examiners. Years ago, one of my students who was also an English major, told me that all English majors at Oberlin could be neatly divided into either “truth and beauty freaks†or “theoryheads.†Hector clearly champions truth and beauty, while Irwin represents less theory than Thatcherism: the sublimation of all value to that of the market.
I must say that I actively disliked the first half of this movie. I try not to react to movies personally; my assumption is that on this blog the reactions that are most interesting are those that have some universal relevance, not those that speak only to the individual idiosyncracies and experiences of the author. But I lived this movie: the extra semester, the preparation for specialized exams, individualized attention from teachers, the trek to Cambridge for the oral interview, the sense that the reputation of the school rested on how I (we) performed. And the movie seemed entirely artificial: an excuse to raise a theme rather than a genuine exploration of that theme. It is hard to imagine any teacher or student uttering the dialogue. Alan Bennett (the playwright) appears not to have set foot in a school since the 1950s, and so a modern grammar school looks like something out of Beyond the Fringe. There is also a minor theme of homosexuality which is gratuitous and appears to be there only because there must be some law that requires films about British school boys to have at least 25% homosexual content. So we have teachers and students who are homosexual, may be homosexual, and aren’t, but are prepared to indulge because that is how one bonds with other men.
That said, the second half of the movie was much better. The dialogue became sharper (think Lion in Winter or Sports Night), the verbal jousting between boys and teachers quicker and cleverer, there is a poignancy to the twilight of the era of Hector’s approach to teaching, and a third teacher, a woman, takes a larger part and stabilizes the whole movie (she also has a nice, if somewhat obvious, monologue about history without women). The final scene, a “where are they now†for the boys set at some point in the future effectively captures something of how important that last semester at school had been.
Still, I find it hard to believe that this movie speaks to any but a handful of people who had this direct experience. It is ur-parochial. Anybody else see it? I should watch Notes on a Scandal for comparison.
I think the play is far more interesting than the film (the play’s ending is radically different than the film’s . . . sadder and providing a much more articulate critique of Hector’s philosophy of teaching). It’s worth picking up a copy of the dramatic text from your library and comparing notes (the film is very linear while the play is much more circular). The film is more sentimental and the ending, compared to the theatrical source material, is nearly criminal.
I’ll do that. The play got very good reviews which is one reason why I found the movie so disappointing. I assumed the adaptation was much closer.
Well, the adaptation does what most attempt to do: open up the play to allow for additional locations, etc., as well as straighten out the dramatic action so it follows a more cause and effect, linear progression of events. The ending of the film, while radically different in tone as well as meaning (particularly for one key character), is probably more subtle than I give it credit. The film gives you a happy ending that the masses can live with (nice and tidy). The play, in the end, complicates everything that has come before with its strange mixture of ambivalence, irony and loss.
saw this last night. like chris, i liked the second part better than the first, which seemed almost too absurdly stagey. to answer your question, chris, yes, i think it’s possible to be very, very remote from the experience this film portrays and still like it.
i think what i liked best is the film’s reflection on pedagogy, and i think you may be selling the younger teacher character short, chris. he is not simply after results. he is after, and practicing, a cooler, more dynamic way of approaching thought, one that relies on flexing the rhetorical and critical muscles instead on extending the heart and soul. i was dimayed to find that i, too, teach that way, but then consoled by the realization that teaching the way hector does would be most unpractical in today’s universities (though i do know people who do it, to some extent). so, while some of irwin’s suggestions did remind me of the current american (and other places’?) test score craze, others reminded me of our common infatuation with original thought, dazzling hypotheses, and far-out thinking.
i am fascinated by the historical constant of authors’ waxing nostalgic about the good ol’ times when subjects were taught right and not as shabbily as they are taught today. willa cather’s the professor’s house criticizes contemporary academia in exactly the same terms as we do. and then of course there’s socrates. makes you wonder whether it’s a function of age (older people getting misty-eyed about the way things use to be) rather than actual academic decline.
i don’t know that i think the homosexual bit is simply there to fulfill an english-boy-school-flick requirement. hector’s observation that teaching is erotic reminded me of jane gallop and my own personal & direct observations on the eroticism of teaching. sexuality is a good way to express the intense transferential and counter-transferential investements of teaching, and i agree with hector that a good measure of pedagogical success comes from the sublimation of these desires, both on the teacher’s and on the students’ parts.
stephen campbell moore was a bit too anaemic, no?
oh, and, jeff, do you feel like sharing the play’s alternate ending ?
I found compelling the same things that Gio did and I’m glad she has expressed them so well. I would also like to add that Dakin corresponds to how I imagine Arnab looks.
Actually, Arnab looks like a cross between Akhtar and Hector.
OK, if I remember correctly, at the end of the film there is this very stagy/awkward sequence where Hector (years down the road) is remembered by the boys (now, presumably, adults) who tell Mrs. Lintott what they are doing with their lives. This scene sticks out in the film but is in keeping with the dramatic action of the play which moves backwards and forwards in time, is extremely self-reflexive, and employs a lot of direct address to the audience, etc.
So at the end of the play all of the boys reveal their jobs (Crowther and Lockwood become magistrates, Akthar becomes a headmaster of a school, Timms runs a chain of dry-cleaning stores, Rudge builds suburban houses, Dakin is a tax lawyer, etc.). In the film, as I recall, Akthar is not revealed to be a headmaster but we learn that Posner (the cute, Rogers and Hart singing, Dakin-loving, audience favorite) has become a teacher; he has, presumably, carried on the traditions that Hector celebrated in life. We are meant to feel good that Hector’s love of learning has not been entirely wasted on the upwardly mobile (late-modern capitalism hasn’t undermined everything). It’s a feel good ending. The ending of the play is darker in tone. Here’s the text:
IRWIN: Hector said I was a journalist.
MRS LINTOTT: And so you were. Briefly at the school and then on TV. I enjoyed your programmes but they were more journalism than history. What you call yourself now you’re in politics I’m not sure.
IRWIN: I’m not in politics. Who’s in politics? I’m in government.
MRS. LINTOTT: Well you’re not in monastic history, that’s for sure. Hector would have been surprised and gratified too, to find himself regularly recalled in the Old Boys’ Letter few of them can otherwise be bothered to read. Still, of all Hector’s boys, there was only one who truly took everything to heart, remembers everything he was ever taught . . . the songs, the poems, the sayings, the endings; the words of Hector never forgotten.
Posner looks at boys on either side before putting his hand up.
He lives alone in a cottage he has renovated himself, has an allotment and periodic breakdowns. He haunts the local library and keeps a scrapbook of the achievements of his one-time classmates and has a host of friends . . . though only on the internet, and none in his right name or gender. He has long since stopped asking himself where it went wrong.
HECTOR: Finish good lady, the bright day is done and we are for the dark.
IRWIN: He was a good man but I do not think there is time for his kind of teaching any more.
SCRIPPS: No. Love apart, it is the only education worth having.
HECTOR: Pass the parcel. That’s something all of you can do. Take it, feel it and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on boys. That’s the game I wanted you to learn. Pass it on.
End
There is an earlier scene where a mysterious male character interviews the now politically connected celebrity that Irwin has become. This unidentified male asks for an interview as he has been assigned by his therapist to review his past in order to comes to terms with his present situation. “What happened at Oxford? Irwin asks the man. He replies: “Cambridge. It didn’t work out . . . All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left, I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.”
This man, of course, is Posner as a grown up but from reading the text, I’m left to believe that Bennet did not want his theatre spectators to know who this figure was until the final scene supplied above (initially, I remember thinking it must be Scripps as he was the student who wanted to become a writer).
That’s all; though if anyone’s interested I’d like to discuss Hector and Posner’s reading of Hardy’s “Drummer Hodge” at the end of the first act. I think that scene is central to my reading of the play and, therefore, my reading of Hector.
so interesting. i don’t see how the film could have put this in without making posner more of a protagonist that he is. maybe that would have been the right way to go? the film does suffer a bit from not having a strong central character other than hector — hector’s counterpart in the film is irwin, but irwin is a weak character.
dakin seems to be the focus among the boys, which is a waste, really, since, apart from being the object of everyone’s desire, he’s not a very interesting character at all.
i also wanted to say that the play’s ending is a commentary not only on learning but also on homosexuality — non?
i cannot see myself as reading the play (that english stuff stumps me every single time), so yes, if you would discuss the “drummer hodge” scene, it would be great.
maybe not homosexuality but queer identity, yes (which returns to arnab’s acknowledgment that to teach is to occupy a somewhat queered space . . . if that makes sense)
care to elaborate, anyone? all alone, i can’t see how teaching is queer.
Well, Arnab writes about his “own personal & direct observations on the eroticism of teaching. sexuality is a good way to express the intense transferential and counter-transferential investements of teaching, and i agree with hector that a good measure of pedagogical success comes from the sublimation of these desires, both on the teacher’s and on the students’ parts.” I assume such eroticism is not limited to heteronormative interactions but to a wide range of student/teacher engagements. I have worked with young people aged 9 through 29+ in my twenty-six years of educating and the frisson of desire of which Arnab (via Hector) writes has, for me, crossed both aisles, so to speak, and, luckily, sublimating such desires has been part of any pedagogical success I might have achieved (not to mention said students’ maturation process both as learners and as human beings). It is, in the end, about the love of teaching and therefore it is about the love of those for whom you teach, yes?
jeff, where do i write about any such thing? you’re quoting gio, who apparently disagrees with you.
You’re correct . . . sorry. I guess I just wanted it to be you.
arnab has secret crushes on all of his students, male and female, even though he’s too repressed to admit it even to himself.
and i don’t disagree with you, jeff — i just hadn’t thought about the erotic investement i talk about as queer. but, yeah, why not? queer it is, in its wide-hearted and universal embrace!
That is a number of interesting differences between the pley and the movie. I already enjoyed the movie, and now I wish I could have seen the play.
But I did think the movie’s ending was slightly dark, I guess because I have a low threshhold for dark. When I was watching the end, I figured that we were meant to feel sorry for Posner because he had declined from sweet young boy into a Hector-like pattern of falling in love with boys. Albeit it without the groping. Still, maybe that is what Gio means about a comment on the social evolution of homosexuality or queer identity.
Now, reading the playscript provided by Jeff, I wonder if we can read Hector’s comments about “the parcel” in two ways. When he says that it is important not to fetishize great literature but to pass it on, could we think that he is also talking not just about his material but his students? It’s one of those funny things about teaching undergrads: the experience of being bound up in a group of students for a semester or a year and then in almost all cases simply “passing them on” to someone or something else.
I, too, would like to read more about the “Dummer Hodge” scene.