BEFORE: I'm halfway through the year after today, though it's just the end of May, that's how this usually goes for me, especially if I doubled up about once a month, which I think I have so far this year. So I'm at the mid-point of Movie Year 13, I've programmed through the end of July and a few films past "Black Widow", but there's still a lot of year left to go. Still, it feels sort of just like yesterday I was watching "Parasite" and looking forward to watching some Bergman films.
I had a job interview today at a movie theater, something I've been trying to get for several months now, but I won't know for another week if I've got the gig, which would take up several nights each week and my weekend days, too. This could make it much harder for me to watch movies, ironically, at least watching them at home. Sure, I could probably watch them in the theater for free, but are they screening anything I want to see, the films that fit in with my viewing schedule? I'm just not sure. Still, a theater is a fun place to work, at least I remember it that way back in the late 80's when I worked at a couple of them. I guess we'll see if I can get back into this as a sort of a career shift.
Odessa Young carries over again from "Shirley".
THE PLOT: A college professor lives his life with reckless abandon after being diagnosed with a terminal illness.
AFTER: Second film in a row about college professors - well, we are getting close to graduation time, right? Sort of a late May/early June thing? I used to restrict my school-based films to September, but honestly that was a bit confining. Letting a few slip into May or June to represent graduation seemed like the next logical choice - I scheduled two intentionally for the first days of June, "Shirley" and this film were kind of accidents, though.
But this film is a real bummer - it's about a professor who learns he's got inoperable, late-stage cancer, and then how he reacts after the diagnosis. At the same time, he learns his wife is having an affair with the College President and his daughter comes out as a lesbian. There's so much going on in his family that he can't even tell them he's dying, but instead he just goes out and does whatever he wants, sexually or personally, and his teaching methods go out the window as well. He allows anyone who wants to leave his class to get an automatic "C" just for showing up, and then they no longer have to show up. This leaves him with just a few dedicated students, and he just requires each one to do the equivalent of a book report to get a "B". And if the report is good, they get an "A".
This seems like a great deal for the students, but is it really? How much tuition did they or their parents pay, and then they get a teacher who basically gives them a pass? That's a waste of money, most of them are then not going to get any education of value for some percentage of that year's expense. (Who am I to judge? I basically passed computer animation at NYU just by agreeing with the teacher when she asked me if she had already seen my final project. Umm, she hadn't, but I still got a passing grade. Computer animation was in its infancy at the time, so I wouldn't have learned anything useful either way, but I still feel a bit guilty about this.)
We basically spend the whole movie waiting for the main character to die, though, and thankfully the movie is relatively short, because watching him circling the drain for any longer would have just been more depressing, right? I'm going to justify this one by claiming it's part of Mental Health Awareness Month, which quite a few films this month have managed to tie into. "Freedomland", "Harriet", "I Care a Lot", "My Dinner with Hervé", "Judy", "The Devil All the Time", "The Lighthouse", "A Million Little Pieces", even "Papillon" covered issues related to mental health, and two films about shut-ins undergoing breakdowns, "Dolittle" and "Shirley". Wow, that's a lot of people working through some issues. Tonight it's the mental state of somebody who knows he's going to die. Um, soon, because as the main character points out here, we're all going to die someday, we just don't like to be reminded of this on a daily basis.
This movie SO wanted to be "Dead Poets Society", though, and it's just not. Johnny Depp tries to inspire his students by being the opposite of inspirational, warning them to avoid the traps and false paths he took in his own life. In other words, don't make the same mistakes as I did, go out there and make some brand new ones, because damn, at least be original, OK? Instead of trying to seize the day, our hero, Richard, even turns down chemotherapy, which could have extended his life for another year. But, I suppose if that year is spent undergoing treatments, he feels somehow it's not worth doing? This ends up coming across as rather selfish, because there are people, at least his daughter and best friend, who do want to spend more time with him, and now he's taken that opportunity away.
Instead he goes on sabbatical - despite being a tenured professor, he still has to blackmail the college president to get this, threatening to reveal the man's affair with his own wife to the world, which would also ruin the president's marriage. Screenwriters seem to think that an open marriage is some kind of grand solution to the age-old problem of a boring marriage, but I'm willing to bet it causes more problems than it solves. (Just look at what happened in yesterday's film, "Shirley"...) But Richard gets his sabbatical and drives off with his dog, so as not to burden his wife and daughter with the details of his death. OK, so in a few months someone finds his body in a motel somewhere, or in his car, and that's so much better than dying at home? Plus, again, he took away his family's chances of spending his final days with them. I just don't get it.
I guess maybe none of us are mentally prepared to die - but that's no reason to just give up, is it? It occurs to me that the title of the film perhaps has a double meaning - in addition to meaning a college teacher, a "professor" can be "one who professes", as in a person who affirms a faith in or an allegiance to something. To profess is also to claim to have a quality or feeling, when it may not be the case. I think that last definition fits best, Richard doesn't seem to have faith in much of anything at the end of his life, not marriage or education or even that there is a meaning to it all. It just feels more like he's claiming to have beliefs and feelings, but in fact doesn't have belief in anything at all, he just believes that life is pointless, and if he's right, then so is the film.
I'm sorry, but "Shag a waitress" is just no "Carpe diem". And Johnny Depp delivering every line of dialogue in the same low mumble just didn't help.
Also starring Johnny Depp (last seen in "Lucky Them"), Rosemarie DeWitt (last seen in "The Company Men"), Danny Huston (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), Zoey Deutch (last seen in "Zombieland: Double Tap"), Devon Terrell, Ron Livingston (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Siobhan Fallon Hogan (last seen in "The House that Jack Built"), Linda Emond (last seen in "Gemini Man"), Matreya Scarrwener, Paloma Kwiatkowski (last seen in "Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters"), Kaitlyn Bernard (last seen in "1922"), Michael Kopsa (last seen in "Love Happens"), Ken Kramer (last seen in "Steal This Movie"), Keith MacKechnie (last seen in "Frost/Nixon"), Dolores Drake, Debbie Podowski, Javier Lacroix (last seen in "Overboard" (2018)), Justine Warrington, Marilyn Norry (last seen in "Horns"), Farrah Aviva.
RATING: 3 out of 10 pot brownies
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