I Not Only Seized the Day, I Became an English Major

Rating: 8/10 (18 April 2020)

My best teacher in high school and my favorite professors during my first couple of years in college taught English. Even without their heavy influence on my highly pliable mind at the time, English was my favorite subject, so I not only "seized the day", but I seized the whole subject as my major. That was a much greater commitment to the dead poets than the highly privileged young men at Weldon Academy ever even dreamed about. Coming from a lower middle class family and completing twenty years of formal education entirely in the public system with virtually no connections anywhere, I decided that I didn't want to teach or pursue the law profession, and the world decided that I didn't have the talent to earn a living as a writer or even as an editor of actual, able writers. I had seized much more than the day, but where the heck was I in terms of the "real" world, especially when those pesky bills started arriving for food, rent, insurance premiums and the like?
I am in no way defending the narrow-minded oppression and rigidity of education at Weldon Academy, but having experienced what I have in life, there is something to be said for a practical education that prepares one well for the cold reality of what follows the world of classrooms and blackboards. There must be a middle ground somewhere. Just don't ask me where it lies. If you passionately love science, math and information technology, you will never understand what I'm even talking about. Lucky you! In the end, I was forced to pursue another degree that was easier to utilize in the world in which we live, whether we approve of it or not. That having been said, I loved my years as an English major, and I obtained an education that no other subject could have provided me. The problem was landing on my rear end on the day after graduation in an economically wounded post-Vietnam War era when no one was even remotely interested in my essays on the works of William Butler Yeats.
As one who seized far more than just a day, I truly appreciate this film. I can't recall any movie featuring Robin Williams that I ever disliked, sometimes only because of his presence and not because of the rest of the movie. There is no need to describe the terrible circumstances of his end, which are so very sad to all of his fans, including me. In order to appreciate this film fully, one had to be alive in the highly conformist world of 1959, the year in which it occurred. I so despise the character of Mr. Perry, Neil's status obsessed father, not only because I have unfortunately known so many men and women like him in my life and because he alone drove his son to his tragic end but because he failed to acknowledge for even a moment his own responsibility in Neil's death and instinctively shifted the entire blame to the school and specifically to Mr. Keating, his unfortunate scapegoat. Who hasn't painfully witnessed this despicable behavior in real life? Kurtwood Smith played the part perfectly, as did Hitchcock veteran Norman Lloyd in the role of the headmaster, and all of the actors who played the young men were also good. I credit the overall performance of such a young cast and much more than that to director Peter Weir ("Picnic at Hanging Rock", "Gallipoli", "Witness", just to name a few). The sequences of the guys moving through the fields in and around the real St. Andrew's School in Delaware were beautifully filmed.