One of the worst films ever made...

Rating: 1/10 (15 June 2000)

I'm revisiting this comment long after I first wrote it, because I simply didn't explain why this film offends me to the degree that it does. First of all, I cannot recall another film made by artists I admire so much(Peter Weir, Robin Williams) that I detest this much. The moment this film tries to find a plot-- when Kurtwood Smith's character(Neil's father) argues with his son and asks, "Why are you defying me, Neil? Is it this new man? This Mr. Keating?"-- it sounds completely fake. Why would the father assume his teenage son is challenging him because of a teacher? How would he know which teacher to blame? This movie careens through manipulative scenes without ever stopping to really learn about its characters-- Knox's romance with a local girl is given so little screen time, it's absolutely pointless. John Keating's scenes in the classroom use literature as a source for empty sloganeering. That's a concert, not a classroom.
But where the movie really fails its own ideals is in its treatment of the students as they begin to challenge the conventions of their supposedly oppressive private school. A movie that cared about them, and wanted to indict an authoritarian environment, would have a scene showing the school administrators leaning on a student, urging him to turn Keating over to save himself. Cameron, the turncoat character in this film, could have been written sympathetically-- he's an anxious wannabe with no friends, so, in a movie with some empathy, he'd be shown making the decision to rat out the group as a means to win his classmates over. Instead, he gets saddled with dialogue that makes him sound like a neo-Nazi, so that the audience can clap when Charlie punches him.
At the end of this film, after all the exhortations from their teacher to challenge convention and conformity, these students face a choice. They all choose to lie to save themselves. Wouldn't a good film show its characters making difficult choices and daring to live with the consequences? Wouldn't a film that really cared about education show us characters that have actually learned something?