If Dead Poets Society drove hordes of wide-eyed do-gooders into the teaching profession, the current crop of 'teacher features' is more likely to send them running from the staffroom in despair. Ex-teacher Colm O'Callaghanevaluates the educators now stalking our cinema screens
AS A world-weary history teacher remarks at the start of Notes on a Scandal: "There was a time when we confiscated cigarettes and wank mags. Now its knives and crack cocaine." Teachers and their jobs are changing and - on the evidence of a handful of current and upcoming cinema releases - so is their portrayal on film. This year has already seen four "teacher features" that deal with life in staffroom and classroom.
Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling, playing a crack-addled history teacher in Ryan Fleck's superb Half Nelson, certainly didn't model his character on Mr Chips. Dan Dunn is a potentially brilliant teacher in a New York junior high, whose passion for the dialectics of American history is matched only by his fondness for the crack pipe and trailer-park prostitutes. A familiar character, then, to anyone who has ever attended the TUI annual conference in Killarney.
Dunn shares his illicit secret with 13-year-old lollipop addict Drey and, at one point, Drey even deals crack to Dunn during an all-nighter in a cheap motel. When the street savvy child ultimately provides the teacher with his only meaningful hope of an escape, the usual mentor-pupil relationship is turned on its head. As Lolita meets Trainspotting, viewers are brought to uneasy yet engrossing territory. Half Nelson is a welcome departure from Holywood's usual take on the classroom dynamic.
It's unlikely Dan would have descended into such depravity had he come under the school-room spell of Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank), the lead in Richard LaGravenese's real-life story, Freedom Writers. Gruwell is Dunn's polar extreme: a crusading, All-American achiever cast straight out of last year's Rose of Tralee. The "inspirational teacher" has long provided Hollywood with source material, and Freedom Writers is the latest in a line that includes Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds and Finding Forrester.
At odds with the "site-based instruction" policy of the management at Woodrow Wilson High, Gruwell makes sacrifices to imbue 25 gurriers from Long Beach with the self-understanding that can help them through school and beyond. She even takes two extra jobs (as a hotel concierge and a lingerie retailer) in order to fund books for her pupils. In Ireland this would be easier; she'd simply give grinds three nights a week.
It's in the staffroom that film drama often captures teachers most perceptively. Like those in real schools, the teachers in Freedom Writers, Notes on a Scandal and Half Nelson suffer from similar insecurities, skin disorders and bad dress-sense to their pupils, and the staffrooms thrive on cynicism, sarcasm and personal politics.
Within every teaching staff I've known, there exists a philosophical power-struggle between those who believe, as Erin Gruwell does, that teaching is a vocation and those who believe, as several of her colleagues do, that its "just a job". Or "crowd control", as Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) claims in Richard Eyre's Notes on a Scandal.
Covett's tired take on humanity manifests itself in the lack of expectation she has in her pupils. This obsessive, diary-keeping, cat-loving spinster, shot throughout in a variety of nylon polo-necks, reveals herself ultimately as a psychotic straight from Hitchcock. To her, pupils are "feral", and she longs for her own glory days before crack and smack replaced chalk and talk in the classrooms.
Unquestionably, Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society (1989), drove far too many gob-smacked do-gooders into teaching when they should have gone volunteering in Africa instead. Notes on a Scandal's co-lead, Sheba Hunt (Cate Blanchett) is one of these. Having obviously fallen for Robin Williams's intoxicating schtick in DPS, the nymphomaniac art teacher arrives onto the staff at a secondary modern in north London wanting to "give something back" to her students. And this she most certainly does, in the shape of a "nonstop fuck-fest" with a smitten 15-year-old, while her older, hapless husband quaffs wine and plays happy families back home. Sheba is obviously one of those considerate teachers for whom the student always comes first.
In Todd Phillips's School for Scoundrels, another current film based on the teacher-pupil relationship, Dr P (Billy Bob Thornton), a cynical adult education teacher, takes Roger (Jon Meder), a brow-beaten traffic warden, under his wing. If Half Nelson drives the portrayal of the school-room far beyond the usual boundaries, School for Scoundrels volleys it right back again, and draws on the worst traditions of British slapstick.
I can only conclude that, just as there are far more average teachers than exceptional ones, there are far more forgettable portrayals of teachers on film than there are memorable ones. But the beauty of teacher features, for anyone who has ever gone to school, is that you're sure to recognise a character or two who look and sound very, very familiar.
Notes on a Scandal and School for Scoundrels are now on release. Freedom Writers opens today and is reviewed. Half Nelson opens on April 20th
