Bright stars

Rating: 7/10 (15 May 2011)

In the heart of more prolific days, Peter Weir directed this bold anti-establishment gem, starring a conspicuously reined-back Robin Williams as the unorthodox English teacher John Keating - a name that sounds like a poet's, to match the man's passion for the passion of individual will. Williams would do more nuanced, angrier work in Good Will Hunting eight years later, but this was the movie that showed the world he was more than Mork.
The real star of the show is Robert Sean Leonard as the tragic trickster Puck (AKA Neil Perry), whose father can't afford for him to fail, but who cannot live without his thespian dream. With a luminescence reminiscent of Jim Carrey (who would take the titular lead in possibly Weir's finest, The Truman Show), Leonard beautifully portrays the joy and agony of personal expression's vital extremes.
As usual, Weir's aesthetic is classic yet distinct, never bellowing for attention but occasionally coming alive to provide an indelible image: a bicycle sending a wave of birds into the sky; a shy student spinning in a poetic trance; a tiny lost figure stumbling onto a frozen harbour.
Maurice Jarre's ugly synth score is slightly jarring (no pun intended), but Weir is on hand to furnish his soundtrack with a series of well-chosen classical pieces, most memorably two Beethoven excerpts, including the possibly divine "Emperor" second movement, which helped burn Picnic at Hanging Rock into our brains.
There's little subtlety in this Society, but there is a wealth of humanity and truth, and a boundless idealism, amounting to another fine fable in the canon of a modest auteur.