Dead Portents Society

Rating: 5/10 (25 April 2006)

Any film about any sort of greatness faces one particular challenge: how to depict that greatness. For example, to write a great film about a great poet, would you also need to be able to write great poetry? In fact, 'Dead Poets Society ' is a film about not a great poet, but an (allegedly) great teacher (Keating, played by Robin Williams), but the problem is still the same: can you convince the viewer that your character is truly inspiring, and not just irritating? But the fact that I am unimpressed with the teaching methods of the film's hero is only the first of a number of problems I have with this movie. Another is that the hero urges his students to seize the day, and to make the most of their lives, but all he seems to have done with his own life is to become a teacher to some of America's most privileged schoolboys. The generally unfair phrase, "those who can, do; those who can't, teach" actually seems apt in this case. And why should the audience care so much whether these boys, already blessed with every advantage, are inspired to achieve even more than than they would be otherwise? Then there's the issue about how they are actually inspired. All we see happen is a group of exceptionally docile teenagers acquire one quarter the rebelliousness, but ten times the pretentiousness, of any normal adolescent: yet we're apparently supposed to take this as an event of great import. Then one of the boys commits suicide for reasons that bear no relationship to anything that is consistent with modern psychological theories of suicide (that suicide is a symptom of mental illness: but here the character kills himself while of completely sound mind). Finally, the end of the film has echoes of Spartacus but in ludicrously less significant circumstances: are we really meant to be so upset that (however unjustly) a teacher has been sacked from his job? And it maybe doesn't even seem so unjust, not that he is really responsible for the death, but because the film has never shown him teach his classes anything but attitude; and moreover, we see him teaching only a single class in the entire movie, so there's never any sense of his wider life in the school. Director Peter Wier manages the whole piece with the same sort of stylised, refined sensibility also present in his 'Picnic At Hanging Rock'; but at times this seems ludicrous, such as when the class watches a pretty amateur performance of 'A Midsummers Nights Dream' with something close to rapture. In conclusion, this is an irksome film, whose unsubtle message is "think for yourself", but which doesn't actually leave the audience much freedom to do this for themselves.