Peter Weir (1989)

The inspirational schoolteacher is a familiar figure in literature and cinema; some of us have been lucky enough to know one in real life.  Tom Schulman, who wrote Dead Poets Society, is among the fortunate:  his protagonist John Keating was, according to Wikipedia, ‘inspired by one of Schulman’s teachers at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville’.  Peter Weir’s film from Schulman’s screenplay was critically acclaimed and a major commercial hit.  It’s also proof that personal experience, as the starting point for a script, is no guarantee of the final script’s authenticity.  I thought Dead Poets Society was phony when I first saw it thirty-odd years ago.  Returning to it now, as part of BFI’s Weir retrospective, I find it even phonier.

The film’s action takes place mainly in the fictional Welton Academy, a boarding school for teenage boys in Vermont (the actual filming location was St Andrew’s School in Delaware).  Dead Poets Society begins at the start of a new school year, in autumn 1959.  The Welton community – staff and students, the latter accompanied by their parents – is assembled in the school chapel (Welton is an Episcopal institution).  The headmaster, Dr Nolan (Norman Lloyd), presides.  He proclaims Welton’s proud record as a route to Ivy League higher education.  He reminds his audience of the school’s four ‘pillars’ of Tradition, Honor, Discipline, Excellence.  Banners, each of them emblazoned with one of the four watchwords, are borne ritually into the chapel, accompanied by bagpipers (playing ‘Scotland the Brave’).  Once this pompous ceremony-cum-pep-talk is over, Peter Weir loses no time introducing seven classmates, all sixteen-going-on-seventeen, who will be, along with Keating and Nolan, the film’s key dramatis personae.

Among the seven boys, two immediately stand out and will continue to do so.  Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke) is a diffident newcomer to the school, anxiously aware that he’ll have a hard job filling the shoes of an elder brother who was a conspicuously successful Welton student.  Todd’s roommate, Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard), not a newcomer, is apparently more confident and outgoing – but not for long.  His father (Kurtwood Smith) arrives in his son’s room to inform Neil that ‘I’ve decided you’re taking too many extracurricular activities … you can work on the school annual next year’.  Neil protests that he’s assistant editor of the annual, but Mr Perry is adamant, even though outside distractions don’t seem to have impeded Neil’s academic progress so far, judging from the achievement pins arrayed like mini military medals on his school blazer.  Once he has got his way, Neil’s father asks for a private word with his son.  Having embarrassed Neil in the presence of Todd and his other five friends, all of whom were in the room, Mr Perry now scolds Neil for embarrassing him in public, by disputing his authority.

That’s Dead Poets Society’s first phony scene.  Perry père, if he judged the matter sufficiently urgent, would have asked as soon as he entered for a private word with Perry fils.  Whatever else may be said about Mr Perry, he’s proud of his son (alarmingly so) and wouldn’t want to show him up in front of others.  Yet the scene’s phoniness also serves a longer-term purpose.  It makes clear that a troubled relationship underlies his surface geniality.  It points up, as a focus for that relationship, extracurricular activities and Mr Perry’s refusal to tolerate opposition from his son.  These elements in combination will take Neil Perry all the way through to eventual suicide.  He shoots himself with his father’s gun.

John Keating appears briefly during chapel proceedings, the headmaster announcing his appointment to Welton following the retirement of a long-serving member of the English faculty.  Keating, explains Nolan, is ‘himself a graduate of this school’, more recently a teacher ‘at the highly regarded Chester School in London’.  Peter Weir cannily delays Keating’s next appearance – cannily because knowing who’s playing him increases the viewer’s curiosity:  how on earth can Robin Williams fit into what’s obviously a scrupulously conservative set-up?  The answer, of course, is that he doesn’t.  Keating, although he dresses unremarkably, is soon delighting most of the junior-year class of Neil, Todd et al with his eccentric zest and pedagogic iconoclasm.  Keating asks Neil to read aloud from the introduction to Welton’s time-honoured poetry handbook, which explains that determining a poem’s quality is a straightforward matter of plotting its score for ‘perfection’ along the horizontal of a graph and its ‘importance’ on the vertical:  ‘calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness’.  Keating sarcastically draws a graph on the blackboard before instructing the class to rip out all the pages of the introduction.  Astonished and tentative at first, the boys soon get the hang of vandalism.

Neil, especially, is fascinated by Keating.  In the library, he looks up the new English teacher’s Welton history and discovers that, as well as captaining the soccer team and editing the school annual (as Neil won’t be doing), Keating was a founder member of the ‘Dead Poets Society’.  Once they’ve learned more about it from their new teacher, Neil and the others decide to revive the society, in the same place as in Keating’s day:  an ‘old Indian cave’, within easy walking distance of the school grounds.  The original society, says Keating, was

‘dedicated to sucking the marrow out of life.  That’s a phrase from Thoreau that we’d invoke at the beginning of each meeting … we’d … take turns reading from Thoreau, Whitman, Shelley – the biggies. Even some of our own verse … Spirits soared, women swooned, and gods were created, gentlemen, not a bad way to spend an evening, eh?’

The 1959 generation of Dead Poets takes to these gatherings like ducks to water.  Charlie Dalton (Gale Hansen) even manages to persuade two girls, a few years older than the boys, to one of the meetings.  Back at school, he’s inspired to advocate mischievously for Welton to go co-ed.  To underline his new, rebellious spirit, Charlie starts calling himself ‘Nuwanda’ and paints a red lightning bolt on his chest.  (He thinks the name and make-up sound and look Native American …)

John Keating’s first lesson with the junior-year class is just the start of his supposedly liberating heterodoxy, but you’re already wondering how he got the job at Welton – and, since he knows the place as a former student, why he wanted it.  As to how, the film is entirely silent:  Weir and Tom Schulman take it as read that no one expects a movie to bother with references.  As to why, silence might again have been a wiser option.  Well into the narrative, Neil goes to Keating’s office to seek his advice, sees a framed photograph of a woman on Keating’s desk and remarks that ‘She’s pretty’.  Keating replies that ‘She’s also in London – makes it a little difficult’.  The next few lines of dialogue are:

Neil                   How can you stand it?

Keating             Stand what?

Neil                   You can go anywhere.  You can do anything.  How can you stand being here?

Keating             Because I love teaching.  I don’t want to be anywhere else.

Silence then returns.  Neil not only says nothing; he’s not even allowed to look puzzled by the whopping non sequitur of Keating’s ‘I don’t want to be anywhere else’.  It’s true that, when Neil asked him about the Dead Poets Society, Keating’s first reply was ‘I doubt the present administration would look too favourably upon that’, as if the Nolan regime were a reactionary blip in Welton Academy’s liberal history – but that makes no sense either:  the story’s basic premise is that Welton has long been in thrall to Tradition.  John Keating has returned to his alma mater purely for plot purposes – to catalyse conflict, by telling his students to resist conformity, to think for themselves.

Yet Keating is phony, too.  This apostle of independent thinking is no less inclined than the headmaster or Neil’s father to lay down the law:  it’s just that Keating has different dogma.  He’s not slow to tell the junior-year class when they come up with the wrong answer.  Exhorting the boys to ‘seize the day’, he asks why Robert Herrick writes ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ and Charlie suggests, ‘Because he’s in a hurry’.  No! Keating retorts, it’s because ‘we are food for worms, lads’, before launching into a spiel about mortality.  (A teacher keen to educate, rather than to enjoy the sound of his own voice, would sense that Charlie could be on to something, might follow up by asking, ‘And why is he in a hurry?’)  It’s outside the classroom that Keating is more likely to encourage the boys to make their own choices.  That visit to his office is prompted by Neil’s dilemma about appearing as Puck in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Henley Hall, the nearby all-girls private school.  Mr Perry has vetoed this but ‘Acting’s everything to me’, says Neil.  Keating urges him to make clear to his father the strength of his acting passion.  He does that by going ahead with the play.

It’s not hard to guess why Puck’s headdress in the Henley Hall production calls to mind a crown of thorns.  Neil’s father unexpectedly turns up for the performance and stands glowering at the back of the auditorium.  Although Neil catches sight of this spectre at the feast, it doesn’t disrupt his performance, which goes down a storm.  Everyone’s congratulating him when his father, on cue, hauls him out of the theatre, drives him home, and informs his son that he’s being withdrawn from Welton with immediate effect:  instead, he’ll be enrolled in military school en route to medical studies at Harvard.  Neil doesn’t survive the night.  Although Tom Schulman won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Dead Poets Society (!), this is an original script in name only (it does, admittedly, have a good title).  The tragic climax is surely indebted to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, where the influence of a confounding, charismatic teacher leads to a pupil’s death and another pupil then ‘betrays’ the teacher, who loses their job.

Like Jean Brodie, Keating has the lion’s share of the best lines:  a crucial difference is that Muriel Spark was thoroughly ambivalent about her leading lady.  Schulman’s hero-worship of Keating works only as a means of exposing Welton’s sclerotic practices.  When he expounds his own world view, Keating is dismally cliched, full of corny ideas of what matters in literature and life.  Ripping out the introduction from ‘Understanding Poetry’ leads into a speech wherein Keating tells the boys that ‘poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for’.  In his description of the Dead Poets Society, that striking phrase from Thoreau rubs shoulders with Keating’s own hackneyed words:  ‘in the enchantment of the moment we’d let poetry work its magic’.  He’s in the audience for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and tells Neil, about to be abducted by his father, ‘You have the gift!  What a performance – you left even me speechless!’   If only.

John Keating’s raison d’être in the story is to contradict and infuriate Welton conventionality.  Casting Robin Williams in the part was a doubly smart move, thanks to his subversive comedy pedigree and Williams’ conspicuous and persistent appetite for serious film roles.  The occasional, straightforwardly comical bits are the highlights of Dead Poets Society, particularly when Keating tackles the boys’ wariness of Shakespeare with Williams’ quickfire vocal impressions of famous actors reading Shakespearean lines – Olivier, Brando and, best of all, John Wayne.  On the serious side of things, Williams is emotionally fine-tuned.  He’s less impressive, though, when things eventually turn sentimental.

One surprise in returning to Dead Poets Society after so many years is that Robin Williams doesn’t have a huge amount of screen time:  his dominant presence in the film has tricked your memory.  It follows that there’s more than you expected of the boys – not only Neil and Todd but also Charlie and Knox Overstreet (Josh Charles), at the centre of a dull subplot about his starry-eyed courtship of Chris Noel (Alexandra Powers), a head-turning blonde cheerleader at another local high school.  The roles of the other three – Richard Cameron (Dylan Kussman), Steven Meeks (Allelon Ruggiero) and Gerard Pitts (James Waterston) – are relatively small (though Cameron’s won’t be minor).

All these young actors are more than competent.  For the most part, though, they come over, a bit ironically in the circumstances, as a group of conscientious students:  they’ve learned what’s expected of them and deliver – but there’s a well-drilled feel to their acting.  When Keating’s John Wayne drawls, ‘Is this a dagger that I see before me?’, Peter Weir cuts to Ethan Hawke, who is really – that is, spontaneously – laughing.  It’s a very welcome moment.  Elsewhere, Hawke’s playing isn’t essentially different from the others, but he stands out as more emotionally supple and expressive.  It also helps that he’s distinctive to look at (I struggled to tell Gale Hansen and Josh Charles apart when they weren’t on screen together).  Todd seems significantly younger than the others, even though Hawke was in fact slightly older than three of them.  He’s unique among the seven in going on to a sustained career in cinema.  Robert Sean Leonard has focused principally on theatre, with plenty of success.  The rest have worked mainly in television.

Keating’s openly zany teaching methods receive only modest attention from the fuddy-duddy school authorities until Weir and Schulman are good and ready – that is, in the light of Neil Perry’s shocking death.  Peter Weir is a reliably capable storyteller and a skilful judge of pace and tone, but the suicide episode and its aftermath are too much in several ways.  As Neil’s father and mother (Carla Belver) get into bed on the fateful night, there’s a stupidly emphatic close-up on Mr Perry’s bedroom slippers, as if to ridicule him as a narrow-minded creature of habit.  The parents’ slow-motion horror discovery of Neil’s body is garish, Todd Anderson’s next-day display of grief (in a snowy landscape) not much less so.  The headmaster’s ‘inquiry’ into Neil’s death takes place at high speed.  Richard Cameron is the first to break ranks and ‘let Keating fry’.  The other boys are pressured by Nolan into following suit.  All of which leads into the climactic classroom scene.

The headmaster’s own subject is English literature.  With Keating fired instantly, Nolan takes the junior-year class.  (Despite the massed ranks of staff in the chapel and in one brief scene in the Welton dining hall, almost all of them are extras.  MacAllister (Leon Pownall), a Latin master, is among the very few teachers with their own lines to speak – so that Keating can best him, needless to say.)  In perhaps the film’s clumsiest contrivance, Keating arrives to collect his effects just as Nolan has discovered that the opening pages of the ‘Understanding Poetry’ books have been removed, and the class’s reading of poems in the anthology has been, courtesy of Keating, highly selective.  On their first meeting with him, Keating advised the boys to address him in class as ‘Mr Keating or, if you’re slightly more daring, O-Captain-my-Captain’, and explained the Walt Whitman source.  In a subsequent lesson, he stood on his desk for a minute to remind the class of the importance of seeing things from a different point of view.  Now, at this farewell encounter, as Keating prepares to exit the classroom, Todd leaps on his desk, and cries out that he and others were made to sign the statement that led to Keating’s dismissal – ‘You gotta believe me, it’s true!’  ‘I do believe you, Todd,’ replies Keating, with excruciating dignity.

Nolan orders Todd to get down and Keating to leave.  Neither does as he’s told.  Standing his ground, Todd shouts ‘O Captain! my Captain!’  Knox Overstreet jumps onto his desk and does the same.  Soon, half the class are out of their seats, even Hopkins (Matt Carey), who wasn’t in the Dead Poets group (and, when Keating asked the class to write a poem, came up sarcastically with ‘The cat sat on the mat’).  As the ‘I Am Spartacus’ finale develops, you hope against hope that proudly anti-conformist Keating might find the humour to warn the boys against following the crowd, even commend treacherous Richard Cameron and some others for staying sitting down.  But the funny side of Keating – and of Robin Williams – has by now deliquesced into sanctimony.  The vanquished headmaster finally runs out of words, which leaves the film’s closing line to Keating.  He radiates saintly vindication as he simply says, ‘Thank you, boys, thank you.’

11 April 2026