The Kindergarten Teacher

Year 13, Day 153 - 6/2/21 - Movie #3,858

BEFORE: Samrat Chakrabarti carries over from "After Class", making a nice little double-feature about school, here in the graduation month.  And here are my acting links for the rest of June, if all goes as planned: Gael Garcia Bernal, Bill Murray, Joel Murray, Sarah Baker, Bobby Cannavale, Jon Hamm, Treat Williams, Robert Duvall, Donald Sutherland, Susan Sarandon, Sean McCann, John Ashton, Kelsey Grammer, Seth Rogen, Sean Whalen, Dax Shepard, Tim Heidecker, Beck Bennett, Jillian Bell, Michaela Watkins and Hayes MacArthur. 

THE PLOT: A kindergarten teacher in New York becomes obsessed with one of her students whom she believes is a child prodigy. 

AFTER: This is another weird one tonight, I'm just not sure that any kindergarten teacher would act this way in real life, just because one of her students showed an affinity for writing poems.  Which, I'm not even sure is the case, Lisa Spinelli just sort of assumes that the boy, Jimmy, has written the poems that he's heard reciting, but it's not necessarily so - at one point when she meets with the boy's uncle, Sanjay, he mentions that the two of them sometimes memorize poems together, why didn't she pick up on this?  But I kept waiting for her (or anyone) to Google some of the lines of poetry, to possibly learn that they were from someone else's published poems.  The film just didn't go in that direction, unfortunately.  Jeez, whenever I hear a song that sounds semi-familiar playing in a diner or something, I just Google a couple lyrics and that usually settles things.  

But there's some weird obsession that Lisa has for the little boy, and maybe it's connected to some unhappiness in her marriage, or the fact that her children are older and in high school (so of course they're disobedient and reject everything their parents stand for) or maybe she's going out of her way to impress her poetry teacher in her continuing education class.  Why else would she repeat some of Jimmy's poems in class, as if she had written them herself?  That's just not cool, plagiarizing from a six-year-old.  She'd earlier been dinged in class for her poems being "derivative", isn't reading someone else's work as your own the ultimate expression of being derivative?  

Come on, how hard is it to write poetry?  It's not - but I guess it can be difficult to write GOOD poetry.  But what defines GOOD poetry, isn't that all subjective?  I guess her teacher and classmates just know it when they hear it?  OK, but then what makes the nonsensical rhymes of a young boy better than any other poems?  Is it just because they're obtuse and hard to understand?  Lisa is convinced she's found the next Mozart of poetry, but again, shouldn't it be easier to believe that a small boy heard an obscure poem somewhere else, and committed it to memory?

One of the things that mentally got me through the last year was writing limericks, at first about COVID (so many good rhymes there: covid nineteen, vaccine, clean, proper hygiene, quarantine...) and then about the election, protest movements, the insurrection, etc.  I'd stay up late watching MSNBC and then tweet out one or two limericks based on the news of the day.  How easy is it to write a limerick?  You just need three key words that rhyme, plus two others, and some kind of twist in the last line, after a set-up and an aside.  It's simple - I'm not saying my poetry's up there with Shakespeare or Robert Frost, but it was a great outlet for my thoughts, and I think some of them were rather clever.   

Anyway, Lisa starts worming her way more and more into young Jimmy's life, she discredits his nanny just because the nanny knows nothing about poetry and is not encouraging his talents, she goes out of her way to track down the boy's uncle and father to try to convince them the boy is a prodigy, and by the time she's sneaking him out of baseball practice to have him recite his work at a poetry reading, from there it's just a short leap to the inevitable, illogical next step.  This feels like the kind of film with a bit of a dark twist that would do really well at Sundance - yep, it won the Directing Award there and was a nominee for the Grand Jury Prize.  

(I'm back working the festival circuit myself, my boss directed a new animated short about the pandemic, and I've been working with the producers to develop the best festival strategy, as it turns out I've been entering films for a few decades now, and I've got sage advice over which festivals to enter, some of which could qualify the short for an Oscar.  You never know, there's a lot to consider when you're navigating the tricky world of film festivals, but as they say, "You've got to be in it to win it..."  You can't win anything at the festivals you don't enter, so one approach is to just enter everything and hope for the best - although I think a more selective strategy is probably the best.)

Anyway, it's a slow burn here as fascination with her student turns into obsession, and then eventually a line is crossed and the authorities have to get involved.  Maggie Gyllenhaal might be one of the few actresses who could pull this off, without the audience absolutely hating the character as a result.  It's too bad that National Mental Health Awareness Month is over...

(Damn it, today is Justin Long's birthday, I was just ONE day off...)

Also starring Maggie Gyllenhaal (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Parker Sevak, Michael Chernus (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), Gael Garcia Bernal (last heard in "Coco"), Anna Baryshnikov (last seen in "Manchester By the Sea"), Ajay Naidu (last seen in "The Wrestler"), Rosa Salazar (last seen in "CHIPS"), Sam Jules, Daisy Tahan (last seen in "Motherhood"), Ato Blankson-Wood (last seen in "BlacKkKlansman"), LIbya Pugh, Carter Kojima, Jillian Panlilio, Noah Rhodes, Haley Murphy, Carson Grant (last seen in "Shaft" (2000)), Stefaniya Makarova, Clark Carmichael (last seen in "The Irishman"), Shyaporn Theerakulstit, Cassandra Paras, Allen McCullough (last seen in "Shirley"), Kea Trevett. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 trips on the Staten Island ferry