[SPOILER] Peter Weir's 'earlier' masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (19 November 2004)

DEAD POETS SOCIETY is, in my opinion, Peter Weir's 'earlier' masterpiece before his 'later' masterpiece, 2003's MASTER AND COMMANDER. Both films were nominated for Best Picture by the Academy and both lost (the latter to Peter Jackson's unstoppable LORD OF THE RINGS/RETURN OF THE KING). However, 'loser' is a heavily relative term, especially when it comes to the Oscars, and the Best Picture nominations of both films alone speaks volumes: Weir is truly a cinematic visionary and a consummate director.
The visceral, emotional power of DPS, which seems to impact the subconscious directly, is something I've pondered deeply and carefully for over a decade now. One certainly experiences it consciously in the film's shattering juxtaposition of the youthful exuberance for life and the awakening of self-discovery/self-understanding among the DPS students with its total negation-Neil's self-destruction and his friends' brutal realization of human frailty and mortality. Certainly, those things are 'up front and center' in this film. Even so, my personal sense is that the film's greatest emotional power stems from and is communicated through its fabulous use of foreshadowing/parallelism(s) and assorted kinds of symbolism, subtle elements that are not often mentioned in discussions of DPS. So I would argue that there is a kind of mystical or even 'predestinarian' subtext at work behind the film's dialogue, action and character development as well.
While Tom Schulman's Academy Award-winning script (which I have an autographed copy of in front of me as I write this) proceeds from a rather superficial premise-an overly caricatured confrontation between philosophical liberalism and conservatism (i.e., Keating vs. Welton Academy generally and Mr. Nolan specifically)-it nonetheless contains all the necessary essentials for Weir's elevation of this coming-of-age drama to something far more eloquent and profound than what the confrontation-of-personified-philosophical-viewpoints framework alone provides.
Judging from the accounts I've read of the directing and shooting of DPS, Weir accomplished this elevation by 'filling the role of John Keating' himself for his student-character cast, Robin Williams, and the entire crew. Weir challenged his actors (just as Keating challenged his students) and drew out of them their best creative and collaborative efforts, even allowing them varying degrees of license to invent their own dialogue and action-and not just Robin Williams, whose bread and butter is improvisation, but the student character actors also, who were only '18 after all' (Robert Sean Leonard's own words, in a note he wrote to me in November 1996).
What this adds up to is a group of outstanding young actors 'coming of age' in their own lives and careers through Weir's mentoring at the very time they were playing student characters undergoing the same thing at Keating's hand; thus, Weir gets irrepressibly dynamic and believable performances from Hawke, Leonard, Charles, Hansen, Kussman, Ruggiero, Waterston, et al. I've read that DPS was filmed in sequence and suspect that the 'real time' shooting progression only enhanced the 'Weir/Keating' effect further.
I mentioned foreshadowing, parallelism(s) and symbolism above, and while there are many examples of those elements throughout the film-too many to recount here, unfortunately-I should note that they all seem to converge, rather like a lens which powerfully focuses sunlight down to a single, burning point, during the 'signature Peter Weir moment' in DPS-the scene in which Neil dons Puck's crown for the last time and then slowly bows his head while standing bare-chested at his opened bedroom window before the frosty, mystical night air. (A truly Thoreau-esque moment as well.)
In support of my surmise that Neil's window scene is THE pivotal moment in DPS (just as the Neil/Todd character pair/cross-vectored interchange are the central CHARACTER/PLOT focus of the film), I would only ask other DPS viewers to consider how FORCEFULLY the window scene culminates and epiphanies many earlier elements of the film's dialogue, plot, sound, and visual imagery, and WHY it does so. When you unravel the various parallelism's, foreshadowing and symbolism(s), DPS suddenly reveals its hidden depths and extra dimensions, which in turn make it apparent that the film is art of the highest order. And-again-all of this is Peter Weir's doing-e.g., the novelization of the script doesn't carry anything APPROACHING the emotional wallop that the film wields.
A postscript: The extended/Director's cut version of the film (aired some years ago on the USA Network) is preferable to the current US/Region 1 DVD release because the additional footage helps lay important developmental groundwork for all that I've mentioned above. So my personal hope is that an extended version DVD (whose production is preferably overseen by Peter Weir himself) will also be released some day soon. This magnificent film deserves it.
Kudos and best wishes to Peter Weir and all his 'students.'
Donald Campfield, D.M.A. [11/19/04]