Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

"History Boys," the 2006 movie adapted by Alan Bennett from his hit play is very, very British. I don't just mean the Union Jack providing the background of the DVD cover, either. The set-up is quite alien and not fully comprehensible to me. Eight Sheffield (Yorkshire) "public school" boys of middle-class (or lower) background, circa 1983, have done well on their A-level exams and are being prepared (in a "seventh term") to try to get into Cambridge or Oxford. The headmaster (a blustery martinet type played by Clive Merrison) is eager to enhance the school's prestige by placing them in the elite university.

It also seems very, very English in that the boys are very articulate, most everyone is witty, and the young 'uns are fond of a very portly and eccentric master named Hector(Richard Griffiths) who fills them with poetry of Auden, Hardy, Housman, and Larkin, and gives one or another of them a ride home after school on his motorcycle. They shrug off his groping them (they joke about it but the only one who is fazed by it is the gay boy who is never invited, seemingly because he might respond, though given that his voice has not changed, perhaps because he has not reached puberty). They are also very blasé about the gay boy who is totally smitten by the brattiest boy, who is also the only one with any heterosexual experience. And they exhibit no prejudice against the Muslim boy (played by Sacha Dhawan) or the black (Afro-Caribbean, I think, played by Samuel Anderson) one--though the play/movie primarily focuses on three of the six white boys.

The headmaster augments the history teachers that have gotten the boys to where they have a chance for Oxbridge (either one will be fine, thank you very much), Hector and Mrs. Lintott (a very wry Frances de la Tour) with some new, younger blood... and (meretricious) flash. Tom Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore [Bright Young Things]) seeks to give the boys Edge (not just "an edge"). To get noticed by the gatekeepers, he advocates that they take unexpected positions (on, for instance, Hitler and Stalin).

One might expect there to be open conflict between the differing views of what history is (and is for) and for the affection of the boys, but this does not happen. De la Tour gets a great speech about Women in History, which is not at all what she has been teaching. I'm not sure that it's in character, but it is a coup de theatre that I like.

Indeed, much of the plot and character require suspension of disbelief. I'm willing, though I suspect others might be more resistant to the charms and the preternatural levels of tolerance most everyone displays. I was delighted when Dakin (Dominic Cooper), the most cynical careerist character, in rapid succession does things for the three other leading characters. I can swallow this burst of altruism primarily because I think that to manipulate everyone so successfully, he has to have insight into others.

As the usually overlooked rugby-playing Rudge, Russell Tovey is very good. (Bennett gave him some great lines, while apportioning none to the black boy and only one to the Muslim one). Griffith has a showy part and fills it. De la Tour and Irwin are outstanding in less showy parts. Along with expressing his frustrations, Posner gets to sing "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" and to take on the parts played by Bette Davis and Celia Johnson in scenes from "Now, Voyager" and "Brief Encounter" (part of Hector's preparation of the boys for Life!). Samuel Barnett does well in the part. And Dominic Cooper as the lupine manipulator Dakin manages to get me to accept his rash of good deeds.

The movie cast was the Broadway cast which was the London cast. They had been inhabiting the roles for a long time and I am glad that this record of the play by its original cast exists. I didn't find it stage set-bound. I enjoy the wit and articulateness and goodness that are rarely if ever encountered in real life. The movie may seem too theatrical (and didactic theater at that) to some, but not for me. I also enjoyed the "making of" feature, though it contained no surprises or amazing insights.

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(The obvious comparisons are "Good-bye, Mr. Chips" and "The Dead Poet's Society." I think that there is much--though transformed--of Simon Gray's "Butley" in it, but making that case would take a lot of words and be incomprehensible to those who have not seen both plays or the screen adaptations of both.)

I enjoy Bennett's writing. I've epined about a large collection of his essays, and journal entries, Untold Stories, and the volume containing his novel The Clothes They Stood Up In with what he wrote about himself and the very delusional woman who parked her van on his property that he adapted into the play "The Lady in the Van" (which I was managed to see in London with Maggie Smith in the title role). Bennett has adapted for the screen a number of his plays, including the "Talking Heads" ones, "The Madness of King George" (also directed by Hytner, who is not the most cinematic of directors--"The Crucible," "Twelfth Night," "The Object of My Affection"), "An Englishman Abroad" (with unforgettable performances by Coral Browne and Alan Bates), and "A Question of Attribution" (with Prunella Scales as Elizabeth II), plus adapting Prick Up Your Ears for Stephen Frears (memorably enacted by Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina).

Griffith is most familiar as Harry Potter's vicious Uncle Vernon. I thought that he was superb in "Heroes" on stage in London a few years ago (with John Hurt and Ken Stott), and in a dual role in "Naked Gun 2 1/2" earlier. More recently (earlier this year), he was on stage (in the Richard Burton ranting role) with a naked Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) in "Peter Shaffer's preposterous 1973 play "Equus." De la Tour played Madame Olympe Maxime in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." Dominic Cooper is playing Sky in the movie version of "Mamma Mia!"

"Very, very British" was an early indication that this is my second English sortie into Ifif1938's French and English Write-Off. (There are more to follow.)


© 2007, Stephen O. Murray


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD