The History Boys (dramatization)
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The History Boys (dramatization) Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Intrigued, but baffled, by this winning film.
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I enjoyed the movie although I had a sneaking suspicion that I was missing something. As a yank, and this isn't the director's thought, I wondered what had happened to all the other A level students who weren't being prepped for application to Oxbridge, surely some of the Math, Science, and English majors received prep courses as well? But that wasn't a major flaw, as I almost immediately put it to rest and tried to accept the movie on its own terms.
More important, I thought, was fact that I wanted to get to know some of the students besides Posner, Dakin, and Rudge and I wasn't given the chance. There was the rather dishy religious boy whose story line went nowhere. The black character seemed an after thought, and the fat boy was sort of a mystery. I confess it saddened me that the only Jewish and only homosexual student was so completely charmless, and so seemingly without hope. Perhaps in the play we would have learned that he had developed some strength of character and confidence, but at the end of the movie we only learn that Posner followed in Hector's footsteps, presumably as a lover of poetry and arcana, was for some unknown reason doomed to fall in love with his students and live in chastity. I guess it's a sign of maturity in a movie to show that one of life's "losers" can be a valuable part of the community and a great educator, but that isn't the impression I was left with.
The major weakness was that I couldn't understand the conflict between the teaching styles of the teachers. Irwin was perhaps cynical about the applications process, but it's a process which deserves cynicism. I felt that I was somehow supposed to be outraged by his teaching, but I don't find anything particularly shocking about suggesting that the Allies had some part in starting the various world wars, or that the Holocaust is a topic that could be discussed in a research paper. And I don't think either concept would have shocked me as a high school student in the 1980's.
But perhaps the conflict between teachers and teaching styles wasn't supposed to a Hollywood contrived collision. Perhaps Irwin was simply shown as one of life's winners, a BBC journalist, by the end of the movie, who excelled at teaching but was not destined to spend his life at a grammar school. Perhaps the fact that Irwin moved on allows us to appreciate the steadiness of Dorothy and Hector, who could be moved to bouts of inspirational teaching, but were, perhaps, less clever, and certainly less practical than Irwin.
I was most confused by Hector's role at the school. I'm not only confused about what he actually was teaching them, I have no concept at all of what he was supposed to be teaching them. What was the value of acting out old Betty Davis movies? Was he simply giving them an education in camp? I would have liked to understand his role at thes chool a little better.
But all of these questions posted do prove that the play maintained my interest, and prompted me to want to understand better. The ending, which was a complete shock to me, works. Never having seen the play, I didn't expect to get to find out how everyone would turn out. It is, perhaps, appropriate that some of the more thoughtful boys, the Catholic turned journalist and the jewish homosexual, appeared meditative and somewhat rueful about their choices of profession. The one boy's death as a soldier was a nice understated comment on the implications of class and income divisions in the world, and how the underclass, even the oxbridge educated, pay the price for the wealthy. It did make me think that Irwin and the boy's school were a culpable for the boy's death. By insisting that he strive for an Oxbridge education he could not pay for, they essentially condemned him to die.
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