Educating Rita (1983)

Like two ships passing in the night, Educating Rita shows the trajectories of two different individuals following their separate paths, one a jaded professor (Michael Caine); the other a naive blue collar hairdresser (Julie Walters) who wants to get an education.

Michael Caine's character is established as a middle-aged college instructor whose career is on autopilot. With no hope of advancement (or fear of dismissal) and with several personal failures on his scorecard, he has taken refuge in drink, rarely even able to make it through so much as a class period without a little liquid fortification.

Accustomed to spending his evenings in the pub, imagine Caine's chagrin when he is assigned a student for night tutorial under a government program.

At first he tries to weasel out of the assignment but the blue collar Rita (Julie Walters) is so irrepressible and charming she wins him over. She chatters away a mile a minute and Caine has difficulty keeping up with the energetic 26 year-old. She has an incisive intelligence but no formal schooling and she wants quite definitely to remedy the latter. When Caine comes to his senses he begins to wonder if he is doing the right thing; helping to bundle Rita's raw native intelligence into the tidy boxes of academic knowledge. Yet, she is the first interesting thing that has happened to him in a couple decades so he selfishly stifles his scruples and teaches her despite his fears.

As time goes on the two make an interesting pair; Rita learns and becomes able to express herself in more complex terms, finally within the mainstream of the student body, and actually begins to outgrow the teacher-student relationship with Caine, reinforcing his fears of creating a Frankenstein. Caine, on the other hand continues on his downward spiral, going ever deeper into alcoholism and bizarre public behavior. The final meetings between professor and student are quite poignant.

From the play by Willy Russell, the staging by Lewis Gilbert is quite ordinary with the two main characters and a few characters that were added by director Gilbert to show the outside lives of Rita and the Professor, and mark the growth or lack thereof. The cinematography is nothing special and the musical score is a bit raucous and bombastic for the most part. However, the characterizations by Michael Caine and Julie Walters are extremely fine and make up for a lot of shortcomings in the production design.

Educating Rita is a play about ideas - not so much about visual depiction of great scenes, therefore I guess Lewis Gilbert felt he could dispense with much more than TV grade production standards.

MINOR SPOILER

A phrase stated more than once gives a subtle hint of the target playwright Willy Russell is aiming for: when you hear, "discuss the difficulties of staging Peer Gynt and how you would address them." We learn Peer Gynt is a play for voices, not visual staging as Rita also learns. Her initial response - "play it on the radio," is more perceptive than she knows. I believe that means you are supposed to get more stimulated intellectually than visually when watching this movie; and, indeed, there are several great ideas percolating in and among the dialogue.

First, of course is the desire to change - Rita wants to be different than her lower class origins and overcomes a lot of obstacles in doing so, only to learn at last that different is only different, not necessarily better. Her thinking was the exact opposite of Caine's. She thought if only she knew the right things, books, music, etc., that was an end in itself. Caine already knew from experience that the knowledge in and of itself did not fill up the emptiness inside, as evidenced by the other character's attempted suicide and Caine's chronic alcoholism.

Another idea is that education may not be all it's cracked up to be. Surely everyone can benefit from schooling but not everybody can apply higher learning and that idea contrasts a sharply intelligent person like Rita with the common herd of students, run through the university like products through a mill, which are part of the reason Caine gave up.

END MINOR SPOILER

Educating Rita is a British film that takes a bit of concentration to watch but rewards the careful viewer with some interesting insights into the area of higher education and self improvement. Both Michael Caine and Julie Walters won British Academy Awards for their performances here. They were nominated but missed out on the American Oscars.

The DVD is presented in color, in 1.85:1 theatrical format and lasts 110 minutes. Also available in pan and scan VHS. Educating Rita is especially recommended for teachers or those interested in the teaching profession or individuals like me, who like to do a lot of pondering and enjoy a well-acted play to stimulate thought.

An entry in ifif1938's French and English finds write-off

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good Date Movie