Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Tue Oct 31, 2006 6:45 am 
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Brilliance and heart

This is a smooth, lively, and vivid conversion of a play to film, but if it weren't it would still be essential viewing for anyone interested in England, contemporary theater, the study of history, secondary education, or gay experience, about all of which it has insightful, touching observations presented in a fast-moving and highly entertaining context. Posner (Samuel Barnett), the Jewish boy who's a late developer and at 17 or 18 has just achieved puberty, is partly the playwright Alan Bennett, but also Bennett's longtime collaborator Nicholas Hytner, who grew up Jewish but sang Christian songs, as Posner does. In his shyness Posner's contrasted with Dakin (Dominic Cooper), the good-looking boy, who through straight is willing to try gay with the young teacher he admires so much, Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), who's brought in to sharpen up the history class so they can get into Oxbridge colleges. Posner says, "I'm a Jew. I'm small. I'm homosexual. And I live in Sheffield. I'm fucked," a speech that brings down the house on stage.

Hector, the magnificent and splendidly large Richard Griffiths, who fills the boys with poetry with no other purpose than to enhance their lives, is in contrast to the clever young Irwin. Irwin is a bit of a poseur who, in the play, later goes on to become a TV history commentator and then a government spin doctor, developments omitted in the film (as is Posner's sad outcome as an unemployed neurotic: in the film Posner's a repressed but successful teacher).

The History Boys' most charming and inimitable moments are those in which the boys speak as a kind of jagged chorus, both flirting with Irwin and "taking the piss" -- teasing him with the doctrines they've imbibed from Hector or chiding Hector for breaking the rules but going right ahead with breaking them (Hector's hilarious "French lesson" is a brilliant set piece in this vein).

When, later on, Hector gets in trouble for "fiddling" with the boys on his motor bike it's suggested to the class that he's a fool. But we know the truth is far different, and more complex. We know that though Mrs. Lintott (the splendid Frances de la Tour) has grounded them in facts and Irwin has shown them how to turn ideas on their heads to charm bored Oxtridge exam readers, it's Hector who's given them a tool to deal with life. It's Hector, who breaks the rules and doesn't care, who's given the boys a love of learning for its own sake -- and for fun, not the "love of literature" or respect for the beauty of "words," but the mystery of art named in E.M. Foster's remark, "only what's seen sideways sinks deep." The boorish, homophobic headmaster (Clive Merrison) represents for Bennett modern educational bureaucrats who insist on "quantifying" learning, which in essence can't be, not in any of the bits that truly matter.

Apart from the smartness and wit everybody notices, this clear-sightedly polemical play/film is also intensely specific, touching, and human. But it's got none of the Dead Poets/Mr. Chips sentimentality about it.

The terrific cast of the film is precisely that of the London and New York play productions -- a cast Bennett as well as Hynter worked with -- who forged an esprit de corps and had the time of their lives. Griffiths, who won the Best Actor Tony during its triumphant Broadway run (while the play got Best Play), has acknowledged his as the role of a lifetime: the eight young actors who're so spirited and such a good ensemble may go on to other important things in their acting lives, one certainly hopes, but they won't forget this experience.

Nor, after seeing the play three times and the film so far twice, will I.

The wise and witty Alan Bennett, whom a London friend called "a national treasure now," has put a lot of himself into the splendid play, both heart and mind, bummers and pains; it's a triumph, and it's great to have this fine, touching record of it on film. There's a little bit of Bennett in most of the boys, except perhaps for Dakin, who's more to be idolized.

Nothing could be better than the way the wit and repartee work on the stage, but the more emotional parts, Dakin's seduction of Irwin, Posner's confession to Irwin, Posner's private lesson on a Hardy poem with Hector, are even stronger in the film's close-ups. And by the way, seeing Dominic Cooper up close, we can tell he really is as good-looking as the play tells us he is, which from the last row one maybe didn't know for sure. The cast have got the right looks as well as the right lines.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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