{"id":30857,"date":"2012-10-03T12:00:52","date_gmt":"2012-10-03T17:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=30857"},"modified":"2012-10-03T11:41:50","modified_gmt":"2012-10-03T16:41:50","slug":"running-down-a-dream-sequence-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=30857","title":{"rendered":"Running Down A Dream Sequence, Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=30789\">started writing on Monday<\/a>, I went to &#8220;Won&#8217;t Back Down&#8221; over the weekend. \u00a0I was literally too tired to finish the post on Sunday &#8211; and Monday and yesterday, things got just a little bit crazy.<\/p>\n<p>As I noted at the time, I generally hate teacher movies. \u00a0I&#8217;m a teacher&#8217;s kid, grandkid, older brother and, for that matter, a former teacher, more or less, myself.<\/p>\n<p>But more than either of those, school choice is a hot topic for me, since the Saint Paul Public Schools <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?cat=34\">ranged between worthless and toxic <\/a>to my children. \u00a0So while I&#8217;m not big into &#8220;heroic teacher&#8221; fable films, I&#8217;m more than ready for a movie about school choice.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway &#8211; I saw the trailer for\u00a0<em>Won&#8217;t Back Down <\/em>a few weeks back, and I thought I more or less figured it out. \u00a0The trailer featured&#8230;:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>The Magic Protected Classes<\/strong>: \u00a0you know the drill. \u00a0The wise old black matron is always the wisest person in the movie, except for Morgan Freeman. \u00a0Every single mother oozes dignity. \u00a0White middle-class people are impacted and defective.<\/li>\n<li><strong>A Cartoonish Enemy<\/strong>: \u00a0a facetless, single-dimension kick toy for all that is wrong in the school in quextion. \u00a0Usually localized, usually beyond any of the locals&#8217; control.<\/li>\n<li><strong>A Sympathetic but challenging love interest<\/strong>: usually improbably virtuous.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Some Cartoonish Side-Villains<\/strong>: \u00a0The husband, or ex-husband, or (white male) boss of any of the protagonists is usually fair game. .<\/li>\n<li><strong>A Heart-Warming Denouement<\/strong>: \u00a0There is usually a triumphant final scene, usually in the school gym.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And all of these button-pushing cliches are present in heaping portion in\u00a0<em>Won&#8217;t Back Down<\/em>. \u00a0And it&#8217;d be easy to write the movie off there.<\/p>\n<p>And it&#8217;d be a huge mistake &#8211; because woven in and among the &#8220;Teacher Movie&#8221; cliches is a really excellent movie and, perhaps more importantly, a movie that makes a fairly honest accounting of a very complex issue.<\/p>\n<p>This movie is complicated. \u00a0 And that&#8217;s a good thing.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Magic PC People<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The movie&#8217;s marquee protagonist, an overextended but supernaturally cute single-mom bartender and car-saleswoman played by Maggie Gyllenhall, chews on the scenery like Phil Niekro attacking a can of Skoal. \u00a0Rebuffed by a clock-punching principal when trying to get a better teacher for her dyslexic daughter at her run-down failing school, I half expected to see the Spice Girls jump out and start dancing as she hammered out her big applause line (&#8220;You know those women who lift cars off their children? They&#8217;ve got nothing on me!&#8221;) like a steam press stamping out door panels. \u00a0Improbably, the only scene where Gyllenhall doesn&#8217;t feel like she&#8217;s trying to orate is the one where her character is, well, trying to orate &#8211; speaking at a rally of parents she and her plucky teaching compatriot managed to organize. \u00a0Suddenly, she&#8217;s subdued. \u00a0Go figure.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve seen this character before &#8211; Julia Roberts played the same lady in &#8220;Erin Brockovich&#8221;, and did it a whole lot more believably. \u00a0 \u00a0Gyllenhall&#8217;s most effectve scene &#8211; when she and her daughter learn they&#8217;ve been passed over for a seat at a charter school &#8211; is the only one where she says absolutely nothing. \u00a0 The camera lingers on the two as they stare, dazed, as the focus swirls about them in a brilliantly\u00a0innovative bit of cinematography that, along with Gyllenhall&#8217;s silent face, says more than the script possibly could have.<\/p>\n<p>Viola Davis, on the other hand, playing a teacher with a crumbling marriage and a creeping case of professional burnout, is brilliant. \u00a0Her part is tailor-made to be turned into a tired cliche. \u00a0Her marriage (to Lance Reddick) is failing fast, and in the movie&#8217;s first scenes, it&#8217;s hard to tell which of the burned-out teachers is going to be the movie&#8217;s real villain. \u00a0Davis &#8211; with a couple of Tony awards and an Oscar nomination under her belt &#8211; plays a role that is historically liable to drift into melodrama &#8211; but plays it with nuance and style, and all of the subtlety that Gyllenhall lacks.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Enemy<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The bad guy in &#8220;teacher movies&#8221; is usually a cartoon. \u00a0And that&#8217;s usually not the worst part.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The Enemy&#8221; in teacher movies is generally one of two things; an administration motivated by some melodramatic, impersonal inertial brought about either by some personal perfidy (sort of the education versions of John Lithgow&#8217;s character in &#8220;Footloose&#8221;) or some generalized social ill that&#8217;s beyond anyone&#8217;s human control. \u00a0The antagonist is, thus, either an easily-dismissed cartoon or some pathology so big that no real person &#8211; only &#8220;the system&#8221; is to blame.<\/p>\n<p>The enemy in\u00a0<em>Won&#8217;t Back Down\u00a0<\/em>is a little bit of both. \u00a0Gyllenhall&#8217;s daughter&#8217;s teacher is a bovine, burned-out waste, a woman punching the clock until her pension kicks in (who only seems like a caricature if you haven&#8217;t had kids in the public schools lately), who is protected by the teacher&#8217;s union.<\/p>\n<p>Now, teachers&#8217; unions have been up in arms over\u00a0<em>Won&#8217;t Back Down<\/em>, which is just further evidence that many of &#8217;em shouldn&#8217;t be teaching your kids without supervision. \u00a0The movie presented as balanced a picture of unions as I can recall in a recent move; no less than three major characters &#8211; the &#8220;Sympathetic But Challenging Love Interest&#8221;, the Greasy Unsympathetic White Guy who runs the union, and his organizer, filling the &#8220;Enemy With A Heart Of Gold&#8221; role (played by Holly Hunter) testify more or less eloquently on why we\u00a0<em>have\u00a0<\/em>unions and why they can be a very good thing. \u00a0I doubt I&#8217;ve ever seen a movie ever spell out the positive case for teachers unions, at least on an idealistic level.<\/p>\n<p>The movie is fair, but it doesn&#8217;t chicken out; ideals notwithstanding, the unions fight\u00a0<em>dirty<\/em> to try to keep the parents from taking over and converting the school to a non-union charter school.<\/p>\n<p>As to side-villains? \u00a0That was a huge surprise; the dissolution of Viola Davis&#8217; character&#8217;s marriage, in a lesser movie, would give it a cheesy side-villain. \u00a0It seems the movie is setting Reddick&#8217;s character &#8211; a black yuppie who builds model World War 2 fighter planes for a hobby &#8211; up to be that venal little distraction. \u00a0Again, it doesn&#8217;t take the easy way out.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Big Finish<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>These movies always end with the big finish &#8211; the math meet, the writing context, the basketball game, the ultimate court hearing, whatever. \u00a0In this case, it&#8217;s the big Pittsburgh School Board meeting where the board votes on the proposal to (near as I can tell) pull the school out of the public system and become a self-governed charter school.<\/p>\n<p>I won&#8217;t spoil it &#8211; not that you can&#8217;t probably figure it out yourself &#8211; although I will point out (pursuant to the &#8220;Magic Protected Classes&#8221; part of the formula), that the wise black and elderly female Jewish vote does unite against the clenched WASP contingent in the final vote. \u00a0Which is pretty much\u00a0<em>de rigeur\u00a0<\/em>these days.<\/p>\n<p>At any rate &#8211; the movie is not immune from the ravages of the Hollywood formula. \u00a0Somehow &#8211; more or less miraculously, I think &#8211; they managed include the better part of a pretty good, sometimes challenging movie in there. \u00a0It&#8217;s the first significant move I&#8217;ve seen to address school choice &#8211; and in between the odd bits of Hollywood, it did a decent job, without oversimplifying (at least in Hollywood terms, and the inevitable shorthand that has to go into fitting a topic as old as the hills, and which has been in the headlines for a couple of decades now, into two hours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I started writing on Monday, I went to &#8220;Won&#8217;t Back Down&#8221; over the weekend. \u00a0I was literally too tired to finish the post on Sunday &#8211; and Monday and yesterday, things got just a little bit crazy. As I noted at the time, I generally hate teacher movies. \u00a0I&#8217;m a teacher&#8217;s kid, grandkid, older [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30857"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30881,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30857\/revisions\/30881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}