Dir. Nicholas Hytner, UK, 2006, 110 mins
Cast: Richard Griffiths, Stephen Campbell Moore, Samuel Barnett, Dominic Cooper
Review by Carol Allen
I have to confess I was mightily predisposed to like this, having loved it as a stage play. While Hytner and writer Alan Bennett have opened the action up just enough to make it work as a film, it is in essence the same piece of work that was seen at the National Theatre, on regional and world tour and which took Broadway by storm, winning loads of awards – same cast, director and writer – so I wasn’t disappointed.
It is for a start a beautiful piece of writing by Bennett – stuffed with wit, fun and cultural references, wonderfully funny dialogue, a highly intelligent debate about the purpose and nature of education and history. Yet it is all from the mouths of perceptively written, engaging and very human characters, who are involved in a story with which both older and younger generations can identify.
It is the story of eight history students at a Northern boys’ grammar school in the '80s being coached for entrance to Oxford or Cambridge. They are an appropriately ethnically mixed group without ramming the fact down our throats in a politically correct way, and one of the ways the story has been opened up is to show us glimpses of their predominately working-class family backgrounds.
It highlights the fact that the most successful way, so far, for working-class children to get to Oxbridge has proved to be the grammar schools, where bright students from modest backgrounds appear to flourish more easily than in a socially levelling comprehensive environment. Although near the end the converse is also acknowledged to show that personal contacts and family influence can also play its part.
Educational politics aside though, this is a brilliantly entertaining movie. Considering they must be some way into their 20s by now, the young actors are all amazingly convincing as schoolboys in their late teens, bursting with youthful testosterone, particularly Cooper as the compulsively seductive Dakin. But Barnett as Posner, coming to terms with his homosexuality and unrequited passion for Dakin and Jamie Parker as Scripps also make a strong impression.
Richard Griffiths gives a comically eccentric yet poignant star turn as Hector, their poetry loving, general studies teacher, who fills the boys’ heads with the delights of English literature while administering the occasional genial clip round the ear.
For him education is an end in itself and his eclectic teaching methods are a delight, which today's focused syllabus have little room for. The French lesson he gives with the boys improvising a scene in a brothel, where the rule is "speak only French", is a masterpiece of bawdy humour, while his covert little fumblings with his students, which they deflect with cheerful, amused tolerance, are both funny and sad.
Frances de La Tour is as dry as fino sherry as their brisk, fact filled history teacher, and Campbell Moore as Irwin, whose approach brings him into conflict with Hector, personifies the less charismatic, goal-focused, modern educational approach as the ambitious, pragmatic, but secretly insecure young teacher, who is hired by the headmaster to give the boys the intellectual "flair" and edge he feels is needed to achieve his and their goal.
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