BEFORE: Before I get to my Father's Day film (and I'm not behind on watching movies, I swear, I'm just behind on posting...) I've got time for one more film about prep-school students. It's grads, then Dads, I promise. Anyway, the linking has taken me here, which happens to be just one step away from my final Father's Day film for the season. Emile Hirsch carries over from "Alpha Dog" and plays another trouble-maker in this one, it looks like. Seems like he's always playing a trouble-maker, or is that just me?
THE PLOT: An idealistic prep school teacher attempts to redeem an incorrigible student.
AFTER: It certainly wasn't intentional, but all three school-based films that ended up being watched in June, rather than September, all were set in religious educational institutions. First there was "Lady Bird", set in a Catholic high school, then "Wish I Was Here" where the two children in the family attended a Jewish school. Tonight I'm back on the Christian front with a film set at St. Benedict's Academy, fictionally located near Washington, D.C., though reportedly based on Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and filmed at Emma Willard School in Troy, NY.
It's tempting at first to just write this one off as just another "teacher connects with his students" film, in the vein of "Dead Poets Society" or "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", but while it certainly has that feel to it, it also touches on some ethics issues that you don't commonly see in a school-based film. I'm also reminded of "Election", where Matthew Broderick's principal got a little too involved with a class president's election, and tried to skew the results, with disastrous consequences. Of course, that was a comedy and this one isn't, but I can still see the connection.
St. Benedict's has an annual "Mr. Julius Caesar" competition, where the top three students in Western Civilization (or is it "Classic Literature"? This is a bit unclear.) class are then quizzed on their knowledge of Roman history in a spelling bee / quiz bowl sort of format, and the winner gets bragging rights and their picture on the wall for future generations to admire. The teacher, Mr. Hundert, makes the mistake of getting a little too familiar with his students, and when he learns that his newest student is the son of a senator who basically neglects his son and gives him no encouragement whatsoever, Mr. Hundert pays extra attention to this boy, Sedgewick, in order to give him the incentive that he needs. Giving the boy a slightly better grade than he deserves not only puts him in the top three for the competition, but also takes a spot away from the boy who rightly deserved it.
When the final competition is underway, the teacher notices that the answers are coming just a bit too easy for a student who only recently displayed any interest in studying, plus he suddenly finds a need to adjust a different part of his toga while trying to come up with the correct answer. Clearly the boy is cheating, but when the teacher brings this to the attention of the headmaster, he's instructed to let it slide, because the boy's father is an influential senator. Hundert, however, feels obligated to then give Sedgewick a question he can't possibly answer, because it's based on a piece of information that doesn't appear in any textbook.
The question then becomes, while two wrongs don't make a right, could three wrongs possibly do so? I think the teacher was probably wrong to fudge the kid's grade, even if that gave him the encouragement he needed, but the kid was also wrong to use crib notes with the names and dates of every Roman emperor. Then sandbagging him with an unanswerable question was meant to rectify both mistakes, but perhaps it just muddied the waters even worse, because when the teacher confronted the student face-to-face, it wasn't getting caught cheating that bothered the kid, it was the fact that he wasn't being punished. And then in the following months, this student lost all interest in studying, and spent his remaining years at the Academy pulling increasingly bad pranks. Clearly he wanted to be caught, on some level, and his cheating was a cry for help, or at least attention.
Years later, the cheating kid has grown into a successful businessman, with a wife and kids, and he offers to donate a substantial sum to the Academy if a rematch of the "Mr. Caesar" competition can be arranged. Despite the fact that Mr. Hundert has retired from the school, after two decades of serving as assistant headmaster and then PASSED OVER for the top job, he agrees to moderate the rematch in order to raise some money for the school to get a new library. But he finds himself back in the same crisis of conscience, as it turns out that the cheating kid never got around to turning over a new leaf, he just found better ways to cheat.
Maybe it's all the recent news, but I couldn't help but think of this character as a stand-in for Donald Trump, even though there couldn't possibly be a connection here (this film was released in 2002). The older version even wants to become a senator like his father, and it's possible that he staged the whole rematch to prove his superiority over his high-school opponent, who just happens to be of Indian descent - he can't let a foreigner be seen as superior to him. Way back before Trump ever ran for office, it's been reported that he misrepresented his wealth in order to appear on the very first version of the Fortune 500 list, and then got more successful in the real estate business after appearing on that list. So his entire career was based on a lie, that "fake it till you make it" approach that managed to pay off. But if someone had called him on his B.S. way back when, if Fortune magazine had done its due diligence and verified his wealth before printing their magazine, then we might be in a very different situation now. Who's to say, maybe Trump would have kept lying about his accomplishments until he succeeded in some fashion.
The dilemma here is very similar, if the teacher had called his student out for cheating, it would have taught him a valuable lesson. It's a tough call, because maybe that kid would then have been kicked out of school and his life would have taken a very bad turn, but at least his business and political career wouldn't be built on a foundation of lies. And the teacher wouldn't have had his crisis of faith, he could at least have lived with his own clear conscience a little better.
Anyway, it's almost a NITPICK POINT that the solution to the teacher's dilemma seems very simple - instead of advancing one student into the competition and denying another student his rightful slot, all he had to do was to announce a tie for third place, and that for one year only, the competition would have four students competing, instead of three. That way everyone gets a fair chance, and nobody would get shut out. But then I guess we'd have a different film.
They really played the relationship stuff close to the vest here, too - Mr. Hundert has several visits with a younger woman, and we're not quite sure what the relationship is there. She's apparently married, but for a long while they never quite say whether she and Hundert were involved before, or are just friends, or are attracted to each other but unable to act on it. Sure, it all gets worked out in the end, but I feel like I could have used a bit more information at the start, instead of having to fill in all the gaps with my imagination.
I'm sorry, I just can't let it go - was this a history class or a literature class? Because if it was history, then the class spent too much time reading Shakespeare, and if it was a literature class, they spent too much time memorizing the names of all the Roman emperors. I was all prepared to call the class "Western Civilization", based on something Mr. Hundert said at the start, and that was a history class in my high school. And the tests seem to back this theory up, but both Wikipedia and the IMDB refer to him as a "Classics" teacher, which suggests literature. So, which was it?
Also starring Kevin Kline (last seen in "Beauty and the Beast"), Jesse Eisenberg (last seen in "The Squid and the Whale"), Embeth Davidtz (last seen in "Junebug"), Rob Morrow (last seen in "The Bucket List"), Edward Herrmann (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Harris Yulin (last seen in "Night Moves"), Paul Dano (last seen in "Youth"), Joel Gretsch (last seen in "Shrink"), Steven Culp (last seen in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"), Patrick Dempsey (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Rishi Mehta, Rahul Khanna, Caitlin O'Heaney, Gabriel Millman, Tim Realbuto, Chris Morales, Luca Bigini, Michael Coppola, Sean Fredricks, Katherine O'Sullivan, Roger Rees (last seen in "The Pink Panther").
RATING: 5 out of 10 essay questions
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