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angelophileI spent last night watching The History Boys, a smart, bittersweet not-quite-comedy from the pen of Alan Bennett. It's a bit of a strange creature - like his "Madness of King George", it's uprooted from a stage play, but still keeps a lot of the conceits of the stage version, particularly with the ending, and never really opens the action up. It doesn't gain a lot from being made into a movie, but on the other hand, neither does it lose much. The fact that the cast and even director reprised their roles from The National Theatre version helps keep the polish.
The story concerns a group of boys in Sheffield in the 1980s, who are being coached for Oxbridge entrance exams. Richard Griffiths is the inspiring English teacher 'Hector', who clashes with young supply teacher Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore) who is interested only in technique and results instead of passion. All quite traditional, but there's a disconcerting undertone to the story. There's disconcerting moments of sexual longing between students and teachers - Hector is inspiring, humorous, wonderfully human, but has a rather unfortunate habit of "laying on hands" when giving his pupils rides home on his motorcycle. Something that both students and Hector understand will never go any further, but the undercurrent of dark longing and sexual desire between the boys and their teacher(s) doesn't always make for entirely comfortable viewing.
The darker undertone and the wicked melancholy means that the movie is no "Goodbye Mr Chips", but something much less insipid. Richard Griffiths rules the roost, making the character of Hector both compelling and genuinely inspiring as his own sadness enables him to connect with the boys, particularly the sensitive Posner (Samuel Barnett), young, idealistic and coming to terms with his own sexual awakening ("I'm a Jew... I'm small... I'm homosexual... and I live in Sheffield. ... I'm fucked.") It's unfair to single out any particularly cast members, however, because even in small roles, everyone plays their part. Frances de la Tour delivers a wonderfully dry performance in her role as the boy's history teacher ("How depressing it is to teach five centuries of masculine ineptitude"), Clive Merrison's Headmaster is a weasel of a man who never quite tips over into pure caricature and Stephen Campbell Moore gives a sensitive polish to Irwin - all zeal and spin, but also struggling with his own feelings.
The clash of the masters is academic; at least until Hector's caught groping one of the boys (hands on teaching perhaps?) and Bennett's classroom drama is suddenly laced with dark longing and sexual desire. It lets this teacher-pupil drama cut deeper than the insipid platitudes of Dead Poet's Society. Think Grange Hill rewritten by WH Auden: slightly fusty but wickedly witty.
The boys themselves are all well developed characters who fill stereotypes but who have enough depth to be more than simple sketches - tubby Timms (James Corden), rebellious Lockwood (Andrew Knott), sporty, unresponsive Rudge (Russell Tovey), frustrated, religious Scripps (Jamie Parker), intense Crowther (Samuel Anderson), friendly, self-assured Akhtar (Sacha Dhawan), sensitive Posner (Samuel Barnett), and cocky Dakin (Dominic Cooper).
The script is both moving and thought-provoking, especially in the quiet moments between students and teachers (a scene where Hector and Posner stray into deeper discussion is a highlight), but not flawless. Certainly the boys don't always feel natural for their time and place - they're a bit too sharp, a bit too witty, a bit too worldly on occasion. It's hard to imagine Oxbridge applicants of the time being passionate enough about what they're being taught to both learn and lead the lessons (acting out scenes from Brief Encounter for example.) But that aside, the script has moments of real pathos and gut-wrenching emotion.
In short, a great movie if you're not offended by frank discussion (and ambiguity) about late-teen and adult sexuality, although the tone, humour and touches may not translate well across the Atlantic - British educational terms, slang and place names abound, as do quotations from Auden, Larkin, Hardy and Shakespeare and the above scene conducted entirely in French (although the fact that the French they're learning is how to conduct yourself in a brothel rather takes off the highbrow edge). However, the central message about emphasis on presentation over substance and the humanity of the case should be universal.
