This movie hasn't aged well

Rating: 4/10 (7 June 2006)

Well, I remember loving this movie when I first saw it 15 years ago in junior high, but perhaps the film's main theme of a young, convention-defying teacher challenging kids to think freely and "seize the day" (an injunction that was repeated ad nauseum, even by a kid who used it as justification for molesting a passed-out girl) has been mimicked so many times that it just isn't novel anymore. More than that, however, the film has a number of inherent flaws.
Williams plays Keating, an English professor who has just arrived at a prep school run by an authoritarian type who is hell-bent on adhering to the institution's guiding principles of tradition and discipline. Williams literally appears to be the only teacher at the school under the age of 95. Williams throws around a lot of quotes, but the full context and meaning of the quotes or the poems from which they are plundered are never explored but are rather exploited to make a cheap point. Whitman's "Oh Captain! My Captain!" is invoked merely b/c Keating wants the students to call him that. At one point Keating gets in an argument with an older teacher who questions his teaching methods, and both engage in a competition of trading quotes from poems. Have any two people in the entire history of humankind ever argued like this? Just curious.
So what are these teaching methods that have the school's elders so worried? Well, most of Keating's classes seem to take place outside. He has the students do things like walk around in a courtyard (so they can "choose their own direction") or recite poems while kicking a ball. He also has them stand up on desks. Keating is apparently a rugby coach as well. At least, I am assuming this, because of the shot in which the kids are playing rugby and Keating is running along the sidelines like an idiot with his hands over his head. Keating doesn't care for textbooks, having students tear out the introduction to a textbook in which it is claimed that poems can be judged on two dimensions and then plotted on an axis. Did such textbooks actually exist back then? What poetry scholar would make such a ridiculous claim? It just seemed as if the filmmakers were setting up a straw man that Keating's character could knock down.
Williams does a decent job with the script that he has to work with. The young actors who played the students were also decent, including a young Ethan Hawke. All of the other characters, who include the school principle, as well as the parents of one of the kids who kills himself, are one dimensional caricatures. This kid kills himself because his domineering father won't permit him to act; such frivolous extracurricular activities, the father claims, will interfere with the father's intentions to send his kid to Harvard to become a doctor. Okay, I had one question. Even assuming that the father sees the fine arts as a distraction from more practical concerns, why in the hell would acting in a play hurt his son's chances of going to Harvard? Don't schools value extracurricular activities? In any case, the father's opposition to his son's acting ambitions is wholly disproportionate, as is the son's failure to realize that once he is in college he will be more independent.
Overall, I think that this film had something to say before the emergence of alternative teaching styles, but it just seems incredibly outdated now.