Film review

  • Bad Teacher

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Josh Kasdan (2011)

    Edward Lawrenson in The Big Issue sees Bad Teacher as a corrective to educator hagiographies like Dead Poets Society.  In this new comedy directed by Josh Kasdan (Lawrence’s son, whose last feature was Walk Hard:  The Dewey Cox Story), Cameron Diaz plays cynical, foulmouthed, drink-and-drugs-fuelled Elizabeth Halsey,  determined to stay with her job at a Chicago school only for as long as it takes her to land a rich husband.   When her mother-dominated fiancé dumps her, Elizabeth has to go back for another stint of teaching.  She decides she needs breast enlargements to land her man.  The school year is a series of schemes to get the money for the surgery.   The screenwriters Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, who’ve written most episodes of the American version of The Office, are well aware of the changing-kids’-lives traditions of classrooms on screen.  On her first day with her new junior high school students, Elizabeth shows them Stand and Deliver with Edward James Olmos.  After that, she gets more eclectic:  any film will do because it means she doesn’t have to do any teaching.  The idea of an anti-role model at the blackboard doesn’t seem that subversive after Half Nelson but the film-makers have a more basic difficulty.  There’s nowhere to go with Bad Teacher:  it’s going to be a letdown if the protagonist changes her ways; and a commercially safe package like this can’t allow Elizabeth’s mercenary heartlessness to triumph.  The eventual compromise is pointless because it makes for an ending so tentative and perfunctory it’s not much less of an anti-climax than it would have been if Elizabeth had turned 100% good teacher.  Bad Teacher is very crude indeed – often verging on the offensive not because it’s gross but because it’s obvious and lazy.  The whole thing feels like a series of sketches.  But they’re held together by some good one-liners and some very agreeable performers, who are well directed by Kasdan.

    Cameron Diaz is as limberly glamorous as ever – although she’s older too (not far off forty now).  This gives a bit of an edge to her presence here – with her big lips (and bright red lipstick), she’s almost excessively luscious.  She’s a skilled and charming comedienne but what’s rather intriguing is the jadedness Diaz gives off:  it’s as if she’s aware she’s been in undemanding roles a bit too long now.  Lucy Punch as Elizabeth’s bête noire, a gratingly wacky goody-goody called Amy Squirrell, is lively and resourceful:  but, in contrast to Diaz (who occasionally seems to be reminding herself to get involved in the film), Punch works a bit too hard.  (Her determined hold on an American accent reinforces this impression.)  Justin Timberlake is Scott Delacorte, the new boy in the staff room who Elizabeth’s after, and he’s excellent.  He uses his neat good looks to fine satirical effect and gives Scott an educated pusillanimity that’s actually very appealing.  Timberlake times to perfection his lines about an Ethiopian restaurant (‘At last they’ve got their own cuisine:  progress’) and when, on a school outing to the Lincoln museum etc in Springfield, Scott asserts, ‘I really hate slavery’.  His dry humping scene with Diaz is genuinely, surprisingly funny.

    Jason Segel is an oddity:  you can sense his wit but he doesn’t seem to know how to use his voice or his face the way that you expect of an experienced actor.   Yet Kasdan did well to cast him as the gym teacher Russell Gettis, who likes the look of Elizabeth as much as she despises him.  Segel’s lack of precision complements Timberlake very effectively – and because Segel seems like a person who’s wandered onto set rather than a practised performer, the final pairing off of Elizabeth and Russell isn’t quite as bad as it deserves to be:  Segel gives it an accidental quality that alleviates the falsity.   In the smaller roles, slender caricatures are given amusing substance by, among others, Phyllis Smith (a hopelessly single middle-aged teacher), John Michael Higgins (the school principal, who’s adopted a dolphin), Matthew J Evans (a geekily sensitive boy in Elizabeth’s class), Molly Shannon (his eagerly encouraging mother) and Dave ‘Gruber’ Allen (a senior member of the staff – and awkwardly droll in the way that only teachers can be).

    19 June 2011

  • Bad Day at Black Rock

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Sturges (1955)

    The symmetry and economy of the plot are appealing.  One day in late 1945 a stranger steps off the Southern Pacific train into a small, isolated town on the edge of a desert.  The stranger’s name is James J Macreedy.  He says he’ll be in Black Rock only 24 hours – he’s looking for a man called Komoko, a Japanese-American farmer.  In the course of his stay, Macreedy discovers that Komoko was murdered by some local men, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  After seeing that the killers’ ringleader, Reno Smith, gets something approaching his just desserts, Macreedy, good as his word, takes the train out of Black Rock next morning.  He has only one arm, having lost the other in Italy, as a soldier in the recently ended war in Europe.  Macreedy nearly lost his life too – it was saved by Komoko’s son, who died as a result.  Macreedy wanted to present to the father his son’s medal of honour and his own gratitude.  Shortly before he leaves Black Rock, the local physician, who doubles up as an undertaker (a really good idea – you wonder why it isn’t standard practice), asks Macreedy for the medal.  This is to help the town, traumatised by the evil deed that took place there, back to spiritual health.  Macreedy hands over the medal and boards the Southern Pacific.

    This is a Western-like narrative and moral schema and maybe that’s why I couldn’t see much in Bad Day at Black Rock.  (Wikipedia describes the film as a thriller combining ‘elements of Western and film noir’ – a profile that’s particularly obvious in André Previn’s overexcited score.)  From the little I’ve read about it, the film was praised for its accumulating suspense but it’s a very limited kind of suspense.  Reno Smith and his henchmen are all immediately hostile and all physically intimidating:  the threat of harm being done to Macreedy is there from the outset.  He refuses, repeatedly and tenaciously, to rise to their menacing bait.  According to the law of Hollywood, it’s long odds against any harm coming to Spencer Tracy, especially as he’s playing a one-armed man.  What’s more, you immediately suspect that the disability is designed to give greater impact to the inevitable moment when Macreedy fights back.  And what happened to Komoko isn’t a mystery for long.  In other words, you’re not waiting for much to happen except for the locals’ baleful hostility to explode and for Macreedy to handle it.  The violence may be simmering but, as Sally said, it goes on and on simmering:  the picture, although it’s very short (81 minutes), is on a low heat for what feels like a long time.    Macreedy eventually retaliates when, as he’s eating a bowl of chilli in a bar, Reno’s sidekick pours lashings of ketchup into the food and taunts him.  Macreedy floors him with a karate blow.  (I managed to misunderstand this, assuming it signified a Japanese connection rather than the common sense of a one-armed man.)

    Spencer Tracy gives Macreedy a bloody-minded gravitas that’s impressive, even if he’s improbably mature as a member of the fighting forces in World War II.  (Tracy was fifty-four when he made this picture but looks considerably older.)  Robert Ryan is a good actor but his quietness as Reno Smith doesn’t work particularly well – perhaps because Tracy is determinedly quiet too, and more expressively so.  The two other heavies are played more predictably, and characteristically, by Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin.  Walter Brennan is the sympathetic medic-mortician, Dean Jagger the hopeless town sheriff, and Jon Ericson a hotel desk clerk who’s more uncertainly unfriendly towards Macreedy than Reno and his cronies are.  Anne Francis – literally the only woman in town – is the desk clerk’s sister, who runs the local garage.   The screenplay, by Millard Kaufman and Don McGuire, was adapted from a story by Howard Breslin.

    26 February 2010

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