A review by Jeffrey Overstreet
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“This is a story… without surprises,” Kevin Kline intones in the wholly unnecessary voice-over narration for The Emperor’s Club.
And he’s almost 100% correct. The movie’s lessons are announced early on. Professor William Hundert (Kline), a sage, well-mannered professor of Western Civilization, hands the Moral To The Story down in sage declarations to his students even before the plot gets rolling. Viewers are never troubled to think for themselves.
The Emperor’s Club is the latest version of the “Honor Thy Teacher” movie, a genre in which Dead Poet’s Society seems to have claimed the crown. It is a difficult story to tell artfully. Lazy storytellers don’t need to worry about the audience missing the point. The teachers can conveniently sum things up for us. That makes it easy on the audience, but it excuses them from thinking for themselves, rather like giving a class the answers to a test rather than making them work for it. Mr. Holland’s Opus failed in similar ways, making us think we were watching a smart film when, instead, we were watching a movie about smart people that was crafted with all the subtlety of a Hallmark card.
The filmmakers – director Michael Hoffman and screenwriter Neil Tolkin – certainly mean well. At least they believe in right and wrong. (A lot of filmmakers these days seem determined to subvert that.) As storytellers, they seem to care deeply about a good education and the need for good father/son and teacher/student relationships. But they’re drawing these pictures with broad strokes. There is the good man versus the bad guys, and everybody else is bland enough to keep from complicating the issue. Tolkin’s liberal use of platitudes and clichés breaks art’s principle rule: Show, don’t tell.
So many platitudes are delivered within the first fifteen minutes, you might think you were watching “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey”:
* “Great ambition and conquest without contribution is without significance. What will your contribution be?”
* “Follow the path.” “Because it is good for the grass?” “No, because it is good for YOU.”
* “The end… DEPENDS UPON… the beginning.”
And later:
* “I believe in you.”
* “A man’s character is his fate.”
* Etc., etc.
Mr. Holland’s Opus and Dead Poets machine-gunned stuff like that at the audience as well. But at least they had strong memorable heroes. Hundert is a tender-hearted but altogether unengaging professor. He’s more interested in teaching character than history. He belongs on a daytime-TV therapy show, not in a classroom. Unlike Robin Williams and Richard Dreyfuss, Kevin Kline – an actor fully capable of greatness – is straitjacketed by the script. Hundert is stiff, conservative, and entirely too polite, without ever dropping that guard. We never get inside his head. The only moments when he exhibits any real depth come when his moral outrage quakes behind a composed, dignified façade. Even his voice-over narration comes across like a fond and sentimental speech at a reunion or a graduation ceremony. At times during the film, I was struck by the similarity of his manner and movements to another rather mechanical big screen character: C3PO.
The boys of Hundert’s class also fall short of distinct personalities. A colorful cast of memorable characters was one of the strengths of Dead Poets. Here, each boy has one distinct affectation: one stammers nervously, one blindly adheres to the rules, one is Indian and thus has an accent. (Of course, the one minority representative is a model student… a very safe decision.)
The school lacks distinction as well. St. Benedict’s School for Boys looks like all the other boys schools we’ve seen at the movies, and yet it is somehow less interesting, less haunted, less beautiful. Even Harry Potter’s school for wizards is more believable in its detail, complexity, and eclectic academic body. The students here clearly come from rich and influential families, but they all seem too comfortable at school, laughing on cue, studying dutifully, obeying with precision so the audience will be unable to miss it when The Rebel arrives.
And then even The Rebel is a disappointment. He’s not really a rebel at all. It’s as though The Rebel bought the K-Mart kit for Boys School Rebels. He is identified as a rebel by A) talking back in class, B) playing pranks, C) having a rich and powerful father, and D)… of course… introducing the other boys to pornography. (You’ll remember, this happened in Dead Poet’s as well.)
This obnoxious meddler is a senator’s son named Sedgewick Bell, and he is played by Emile Hirsch. I’m willing to believe that Hirsch might be a promising young actor, bound by a bad script. After all, in Scent of a Woman, the cookie-cutter Rebel was played by an up-and-comer named Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who has since proven himself the most flexible and talented actor in his age group. But you can tell Hirsch is being carefully controlled here: “Scoff now. Laugh behind the teacher’s back now.” I repeat, “This is a story without surprises.”
I was a bit relieved that The Rebel at least raised the issue of the opposite sex. The film gets positively uncomfortable whenever the subject of women comes up. Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poet’s Society frowned on reckless misbehavior, but he approved of passion. He struck a delicate balance between action and responsibility. In The Emperor’s Club, characters either engage in mannered, Victorian exchanges with the opposite sex, or they plunge into pornography and skinny-dipping with bad girls. Sure, Sedgewick is a womanizer in the making, but Hundert is painfully prudish and a bore. When he is tempted by a beautiful friend (Embeth Davidtz) whose marriage has gone cold, he virtuously resists, but in the most stodgy, distancing, clenched-jaw kind of manner. Here we could have used a bit of the stammering Otto from A Fish Called Wanda. Or perhaps he could have shouted, “You are a boring stereotype, woman!” But no. The poor lady is left to choose between her neglectful husband and the Tin Man. A moment of tenderness or sympathy would seem beyond the bounds of propriety to Mr. Hundert. (The movie goes on to reward his stodgy reserve.)
Halfway through the film, I felt as though I was trapped in a long and perfunctory day of boarding school while outside the sun was shining and people were having fun. I would have much preferred a transfer to Mr. Holland’s class, for the music, or to Robin Williams’ class, so I could listen to a teacher with humor, passion, and verve.
The shallowness of scene after scene is a real shame. Some confrontations had real potential. Exploring the dynamics of Sedgewick’s upbringing, or the specifics of his personal wounds, could have been revealing. Unfortunately, we’re left with the “Daddy doesn’t love me” punchline. Examining how the Senator became Mephistopheles could have given this story the “dust” of realism. Hundert himself might have an interesting past. His final confrontation with a “villain” ends with a man actually saying “If you want to get somewhere in life, if you want to be somebody, you have to lie, cheat, and steal.” I waited for long deep laugh of the Saturday Morning Cartoon bad guy to follow.
The only pleasant surprise of the movie for me was that Hundert’s vow to Sedgewick of “I believe in you” results in only a temporary impact in the young devil’s life. I had expected the film’s sentimental leanings would show the boy fully transformed. This seemed to me like the beginnings of restraint, probably a credit to Ethan Canin, who wrote the short story, instead of the filmmaker. That is what ultimately saves the film from complete disaster in the end… a small element of reality. Things don’t turn out beautifully in the end. Hundert does not become a bestselling author, nor does he have that “Touched by an Angel” ability to heal hearts broken beyond his capacity to repair. I am relieved by what this film does not do.
But I am wholly unmoved and un-entertained by what it does do.
I am sure the film will have a few critics raving. And yes, some might find insight as they contemplate the film’s themes. But people can learn things from a bland after-school special – that doesn’t mean the show is well-made. While it does trumpet good virtues and offer good lessons, it does so without grit, passion, or originality. It announces those lessons to us, even forecasts them, rather than letting us work it out for ourselves. Thus, it gives us the pleasure of agreeing with things we already know, rather than the pleasure of instead of re-discovering truths in a new light.
When watching a movie, I prefer the thrill of discovery over the agony of pious instruction.