Brainless romance of brilliance-by-numbers

Rating: Null/10 (7 May 2003)

The intellectual endeavour that is pure mathematics gets mopped-up, in this film, about as mechanically as the floors our janitor-hero swabs in the College where he works: He idly solves a conundrum left by a professor in order to test the ability of his undergraduate class to their limits.
Our hero can't take anything seriously, though, - least of all an ability that should command any number of excellent, albeit not necessarily academic, occupations - because of an abused childhood. He seems an unlikely combination of colossal arrogance and extremely low self-esteem. This does at least lead to a glorious put-down of some dim rich kid who is nerdily annoying a girl. This is easily the best scene in the movie. The pay-off, when he exhibits the trophy of her 'phone number to the bested contender, saying, 'How d'ye like them apples?' sets up a likeable, if difficult, underdog whom we really want to get to understand.
Unfortunately, this was the only good scene. The intriguing personality of a lad with enormous ability, but a wayward character born of social deprivation, and his anticipated moral struggle to control his mental endowments, is never developed. To put it another way, his character was
never properly conceived and identified in the first place, and so can never be shown developing out of the contradictions of his creator's original confusion.
Part of the problem is that the film half-wants to be another florid paean to the Romance of Learning, along the lines of 'Dead Poet Society'. The presence of Robin Williams - thinly-disguised under a pair of cartoon-shoulders that could only have come out of Popeye's spinach-tin - keeps reminding us of the inspiring teacher he was in that much more reflective (if imperfect) work. But the teacher in 'GWH' is a bland cipher. We shall see that this hopelessly scuppers the film.
In 'GWH' the acquisition of knowledge is presented consistently as being no more than a superior party-trick, the accidental product of a photographic memory. Or even as some virile clash of champions. We see this most absurdly in such scenes as that of the dismissal of the 'great mathematician', after he has been effortlessly bested in the solving of an even bigger and nastier mathematical conundrum, by our young turk: This obviously shattered individual reels off to recover from the mental devastation of being so utterly routed. Presumably he will end his days like some punch-drunk boxer, doing menial tasks, such as mopping the floor, perhaps, - now totally unfitted to draw his inflated salary as a star academic! Or this absurd shoot-out of ten-gallon brains might put us in mind of the baddy in some Wild West circus turn, humbled by the white-hatted radiance of the heroic cypher! There is certainly no inkling, here, of the collegiate pursuit of knowledge. There is no dawning engagement with the wider, grown-up world. There are no shadings. There is no reflection. There is not a particle of reality.
This is mere intellectual philistinism and immaturity. As bildungsromane, this film is the equivalent of the 'Rocky' fight stories. The character's development is told purely in all-American terms of adolescent virility - he is, and remains, a 'regular guy' who is true to the common experience of an intended audience of equally immature peers. His actions are authentically animal, at least, while, on the other hand, his thoughts are nothing more than pure automatism, bereft of the intellectual effort that would only pollute the blond beast so beloved of Americans, handicapped as they often seem to be by a profoundly insecure self-image. It is in order to reform, not his thinking - which is completely incidental to this drama - , but his social behaviour, that he is being granted the boon (as here it appears, rather than as the right!) of education. His therapy is political, intended to indoctrinate him into conformity with general social mores. It does nothing to render him a fit candidate for a higher degree.This alarming, if unconscious, exposure of this creepily conformist agenda, that is at the heart of America's bone-headed populism, is perhaps the only factor making this film worth consideration at all. As a source of sociological reflection on our great neighbour, it is quite alarming to observe herein how readily American youth appears to subscribe to its own enfeeblement.
What a devil's bargain is offered our Everyman of America: Self-realisation through Education - but only, and expressly, through the Trial of Therapy, that uniquely American tool of totalitarian thought-control. It is as if we are being given a re-make of 'A Clockwork Orange', in which we are unblinkingly asked to applaud the perversion of the unruly but human potential of Alex into the bland, neutered and utterly soulless citizen of a society of the like-mindless. This is what 'GWH' implies, by its deliberate confusion of education with therapy. Where 'Dead Poet' inspires (albeit in a rather 'Reader's Digest' fashion), 'GWH' prescribes. The pervading niceness that comes over our bright bad boy is every bit as creepy as 'Clockwork Orange''s brainwashing scenes - more so, since the picture seems blithely untroubled by this perversion of true, organic character development.
Even the more wayward knights of King Arthur's Round Table were expected to actually study discipline, and team-work, and to understand why they should submit to the judgement of their intellectual peers. Even the mad fantasist of Robin Williams' 'Dosser King', in Terry Gilliam's Arthurian subversion of all-American values, demands submission to his testing discipline only in order to restore Jeff Bridges' character, whole, to himself. Nowhere in the juvenile film at issue is the getting of wisdom represented as what it must be, even for the brightest students: 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration. But the American way - the Hollywood way, at least, - to self-realisation is to overdose on emotionalism, as apparently only pure sensation can lead Americans to the true goal of all human fulfillment. Mathematics is not even a witty McGuffin in such a childish formula. And the sprinkling of other cultural references provides no more than high-toned decoration - an impatient short-hand for the engagement with serious and difficult cultural issues, which are entirely absent from the pretentious, adolescent, Ed Wood-scale of artistic self-delusion on display.
Hence the spreading soft-focus of the film, after the first few establishing scenes, and the increasing redundancy of a plot that was never honestly posited on intellectual endeavour at all.
So: Just another Hollywood fairy-tale, without any of that haunted, grown-up sense of darkness that makes a film like Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange' such a powerful fable of the human soul.
A superficial, brainless teen romance of brilliance-by-numbers.