Pros: It's funny, warm, inspiring, and perceptive in its portrayal of teens and learning.
Cons: None worth mentioning, but several worth refuting: see review for details.
The Bottom Line: The greatest, least phony movie about teaching that I've seen. (This review is normal-length, unless you stay for my arguments vs. Roger Ebert.)
There are intelligent movie fans, even major critics, who hate the Dead Poets’ Society; hate it enough to still mention the fact 14 years after its release. I say this because, if you’re one of them, I ask that you stick around; I'll try to address your concerns before this essay’s over. If you’re not one of them, this hatred might seem irrelevant: there’s a much larger number of intelligent people who love the Dead Poets’ Society, and a larger number than _that_ of normal-intelligence people who also love it. Why worry about a few malingerers? I guess it’s because I find their reasons so artfully observed, so creatively precise. They’re dead wrong, but in taking the dead-wrong arguments seriously, I can explain better why the Dead Poets’ Society is, in my opinion, one of the greatest movies ever made.
But first the review, focused on the first 40 minutes. Poets is a movie about a great teacher, and the boys he affects. It is set in 1959 at a classic upper-class American prep school for boys. It’s a school where uniformed boys must together announce that the Four Pillars of their education are Tradition, Honor, Discipline, and Excellence (I didn’t totally catch how the boys chant this in private, but I think it goes from “Submission” to “Excrement”). Teaching is conducted by drill and rote, and Latin students conjugate the verbs together out loud.
It’s a little exaggerated – a loathesome fake essay by “J. Evans Pritchard” called “Understanding Poetry” has to be stupider than the stupidest real essay on poetry that the filmmakers could find – but I’ve observed classes by more than twenty teachers at three Boston-area schools, and the only reason some of the classes don’t look like the ones at Poets’ Weston Academy is that the kids have the wrong culture to sit in their seats and take it. I’ve seen several teachers who would love to run drills as precisely. Heck, two of the most rapidly spreading curricula in urban U.S. schools right now are built on an equally rigid and reactionary style of teaching. Students can and do learn many facts that way.
Into the Weston Academy mix comes new English teacher John Keating, an emergency midyear hire. He’s an old Weston almunus, played by Robin Williams and introduced by the headmaster at a stuffy ceremony in the lavish main hall. He probably teaches several classes, but we see him through the one with which he bonds most closely, the one featuring Neil Perry, his roommate Todd Anderson, Knox Overstreet, Charlie Dalton, and their group. They sit in class waiting for him, that first day, and watch him as he walks in the front door, whistling. Keating continues to whistle as he walks through the class, eyeing the students, and exits at the back end of the room.
Silence. Keating pokes his head back into the room: “Well? Come on!”. The students look at each other in confusion, like wildebeests faced with a river: should we proceed? Or does the river have crocodiles waiting to eat us? Do you know? Do you know who knows? Eventually the first wildebeest, er, student gets up to follow Keating. The rest follow him: he doesn’t seem to think there’s crocodiles, and if there are, they’ll probably eat him first.
Keating shows them to the trophy case. Photographs of long-dead young Westoners dot the case, with the same enforced haircuts and uniforms as the students watching. He introduces the students to a poetic urging that wasn’t a cliche until Poets’ viewers made it one: “Carpe diem”, Latin for “Fish of the day”. No, it’s “Seize the day”, and I shouldn’t tease. It’s a powerful scene, because of Keating’s charisma, and because the boys (like any boys) really have not ever looked at these pictures, not ever accepted the visual evidence that people like them will someday die. By itself, it’s a claim that could make a kid sulk in corners, dressing in some sort of black that isn’t their school uniform, waiting petulantly for Skinny Puppy to be born and grow up and start making bleak industrial music. But even on this first day, Keating is telegraphing his agenda: if someday you’re going to die, right now would be a good time to get on with living. Somehow, poetry has something to do with it.
Poetry and clowning: Keating quickly makes it clear that he knows how important it is to boys that elite grownup subjects be taken down a peg, and his impression of Marlon Brando as Hamlet is classic. He has the gentleness to do good, not harm, in making a student named Pitts the first one he ever calls on: “Mr. Pitts, that’s rather an unfortunate name”, he smiles, directing his amusement at the name rather than its bearer. He likes the kids, so gets to greet wrong answers with “Bzzzt! So sorry, that’s not right, but thank you for playing!” Especially since the wrong answers he teases out are, in general, the well-meaning answers boys toss out to impress the teacher.
The correct answer to Pritchard’s “Understanding Poetry” is not to graph his concepts in your notebook – though Keating himself starts to graph the concepts on the board, with magnificent swoops of the chalk, as a stern decoy – but to rip the dumb essay out of the book. The correct answer to a “What is the purpose of poetry?”, in Keating’s presentation, is “to woo women!”.
But not really, you know: that’s just getting the boys’ attention. Later on he can give his real belief: the purpose of poetry is to be alive, be human. A lawyer, a doctor, a ditchdigger, all of these are useful and important professions to keep us going, alive and viable: the arts are what being human is _for_. Take a look at what percentage of my product reviews are of Movies, Books, and Music, and just guess how little I object to that notion.
************
What of Neil and Todd and Knox and their friends? Well, they’re teenage boys in an all-boy school. They tease each other and snipe at authority and frolic around their rooms. They make minor trouble, if they think they can get away with it. They also do their schoolwork, because boys of their social class do. They listen to their roommates’ concerns, because that way they have someone to share their own concerns with, and adolescence is a very scary time. No news there.
Neil is the repressed and oppressed artist: his father insists on him pursuing the law school straight-and-narrow, but he’s always dreamed of being an actor, and a true actor like John Keating dazzles him. Todd, his roommate, doesn’t show his cards as easily: he’s the new transfer student, and like most new kids he’s holding back, trying to see what aspects of his old personality can be flexed harmlessly in a new environment. Knox is a classic romantic, which will make the life of a rich nearby teenage girl more discomfiting, difficult, and (since Knox is cute) interesting. Dalton is idealistic but mainly restless, a kid who wants something to forchrissake _happen_. Weston has not been a place where things happen, until Keating came along. Keating has students take turns standing on his desk (“See how the world looks different from here?”), and perhaps that’s corny in someone’s world, but it’s sure not how teachers behave. Besides, the world does look different.
So they find Keating’s yearbook, with its embarrassing age-17 picture and its voted award (“student most likely to do anything”), and find that he founded something called the Dead Poets’ Society. Half-reluctantly, he explains that he and the Dead Poets gathered in a cave in the woods with poems. “You were a bunch of guys reading poetry?”, ask the students; “No, gentlemen, we dripped honey from our tongues”, spun silken webs of words, spread magic. Well, that does sound better. To Neil, it’s what he’s been waiting for all these years, and it’s pretty exciting for Knox and Dalton too. They pull others along; Todd is sorta bullied into going, with the promise that, instead of reading aloud, he can take the minutes of the meeting.
What are the meetings like? Like meetings of teens. They chant and invent tribal dances; they read poems written on the other side of nudie-mag centerfolds; they even do poetry as poetry. Dalton finds a couple of pretty girls to bring along, and he recites classic love poems for them. “That’s beautiful! Did you make that up?”, the girls ask, and what can he say but “Just something that came to me, that I wrote for you. There’s lots more where that came from”.
************
Eventually the Dead Poets’ defiance will get them in trouble, under Dalton’s banner of “What good are we if we don’t try to change anything, if we just hide in the woods?”. Eventually Keating will face some questioning from the headmaster McAllister, who loves poetry just as much as Keating does (you can tell in their lunchtime battles of recitation), and who wonders why English students should be prancing around the courtyard during class. Eventually Neil’s love of language and theatre will conflict with his father’s strict prohibition of anything that might take time away from studying.
It’s inevitable because it’s real. Conformity is not an accident of the school system; obedience is not a leaky byproduct of how parents raise their children. You say “free thinker”, she says “ignorant jerk piissing on values you don’t understand”. You say “risk-taker”, he says “kamikaze”. The story is in how these values collide.
The story is also, mind you, of how much safer it is to shrug along, invent silly walks on command, and nonconform when ordered. The final scene of Dead Poets’ Society (watch for it) may be my favorite scene in movie history, because it’s so breathtakingly honest. It’s inspiring, yes; it’s a set piece meant to be inspiring, and the movie earns every last bit of its effect. But watch what the scene doesn’t show, and name me any other movie about teaching that would be as restrained: as beautifully, lovingly accurate.
*************************************************************************************
*************************************************************************************
So! That’s my review of Dead Poets’ Society. Run along! The rest is for people who love or hate the movie, or just want to talk about teachers and teens: it's me versus hostile critics, using the words of Roger Ebert.
There are brief quotations from Tennyson, Herrick, Whitman and even Vachel Lindsay, as well as a brave excursion into prose that takes us as far as Thoreau's Walden. None of these writers are studied, however, in a spirit that would lend respect to their language.
On camera, no: poetry is not “studied” on camera. A good movie movie _could_ be made out of running a camera for two brilliant classes, but few would watch it. But a better response is to ask the critic to focus on the whole “barbaric yawp” scene. We see Keating himself studying, from the start: he studies the students, gets to know their interests and their fears. We see him get to work on frightened Todd Anderson, and we see him startle Todd into making poetry. We don’t stick around to see the debriefing, but even in the moment, the students are primed to hear what’s poetic about it.
Or watch Keating deal with a student whose first oral poem reads, in entirety, “The cat sat on the mat”. If all we learn from that interchange is that ordinary subject matter is good but ordinary imagery is bad: well, that’s a useful starting point. It shouldn’t be mistaken for more, but getting students to the starting point is the hardest part of teaching.
They're simply plundered for slogans to exort the students toward more personal freedom.
Ebert is slightly off-base, but a serious objection could be made from this. Keating isn’t urging them towards “freedom”: he requires as much homework as anyone else, and it’s difficult, creative homework. He is rigorously in charge in class, and “I don’t hear enough ripping!” (for the Pritchard essay) is as admonishing as anything the Latin teacher might say. But he is pushing the students to individuate, to find their own passion; he is plundering the “I Sing of Myself” school of poetry. He’s rearing them on Walt Whitman, you might argue, but they’re wealthy, privileged kids who are likely to attain all the personal power they could ask. If Walt teaches the privileged to assert themselves, how is this unlike Ayn Rand, and her war-of-all-against-all politics?
But see, a huge problem with Ayn Rand’s Libertarian politics is that – in its ultimate endorsement of corporate gigantism, in its defense of the rights of men in uncomfortable neckties who own large but hideous 5th homes – it crushes the independence that makes her the Fountainhead so erratically appealing. Young students en route to wealth are as dependent as anyone else. The strongest human urge, especially during childhood, is to imitate, to find a group. The power of the rich, even rich adults, is a fiction if they only do what they're told they should want.
There’s years of distance from “I Sing of Myself”, and the selfish girl-catching whimsies of Tennyson, to the caution and wisdom and love-of-language in, say, a new-love song by the Loud Family:
We sensed a scare, but there's no scare there:
Look out and, good, there are no lions in the street.
We sensed a change, but the change came strange:
All things get painted the right colors when we meet,
Short and sweet.
Will it be all that many-splendored?
Will there be return for the sender?
Will it even love us tender?
The things we've done we've only done for a little while.
To be a cowboy, learn how not to be an astronaut.
To be a doctor, learn how not to be the president.
To be the center of the universe, don't orbit things.
But you have to start the kids somewhere. Rich or not, Weston’s students need self-assertion a lot more than they need more caution.
Poets is criticised for the portrayal of Neil’s dad, who is nothing more than Neil’s taskmaster: but that is a pose grownups adopt. Yes, Mr. Perry may have a complex inner life, he may cheer maniacally at lacross matches, he may tell funny stories to his co-workers, he may be adept and kinky in bed; who knows? Neil doesn’t. Neil knows only what his Dad thinks Neil ought to see, what his Dad feels allowed to show. And so I come to one final issue, again from Ebert:
at the end of this semester, all they really love is the teacher.
Loving the teacher is the starting point. It has to be.
Keating tells McAllister that he wants the kids to be free-thinkers, and McAllister replies “Free thinkers at 17? Funny”. I chose this as the review title because McAllister is right. Oh, it’s _possible_ to be a free-thinker at 17: read our Shadesofblue, for example. Tell me that her favorite bands are Yes and Supertramp because of her peer group, that she gives positive reviews to atlases and sociology textbooks so she can fit in, that it’s possible to have even heard of Vanessa Daou without being bizarrely curious. But she also openly admits to having no real-life friends. I was a free-thinker at 17, making up my own solutions to political issues my teachers hadn't heard of; I had friends at 17, but I had no friends at 14 or 19. Neil and Knox and Dalton are not free-thinkers, not yet.
What Keating does is help them play-act the role. Young nonconformists listen to punk rock or goth or metal cuz that's what all the other nonconformists are listening to. (Old, experienced free-thinkers can like Britney if they want.) Questioning the mainstream in unison is how you prepare to question the mainstream alone. It’s something you can be punished for; it’s something you can be slammed into lockers for. You don’t risk that unless it’s for someone you love.
John Keating’s comedy, his impressions, his dramatics, are part and parcel of his teaching. There’s a hundred different approaches that would work, but all of them flip the script: all of them shift the teacher out of the distant, hostile category of Adult. Keating catches the students’ imaginations by catching them by surprise. He stays at the center because it’s his talent – he is, after all, played by Robin Williams – and because from the center he’s able to see all, and to bring students into the spotlight selectively.
His self-assigned tasks are two: to make the students love him, and to make them see that the proper way to love him is to love poetry. Once the words work their magic, once the careless art of writing takes hold, he can withdraw from the equation.
Academy Award winner Robin Williams delivers a brilliant performance in one of Hollywood s most compelling and thought-provoking motion pictures. Will...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.