Teachers

1984 movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: JFK, an inner-city school with its share of inner-city problems, deals with a lawsuit from the family of a boy who graduated without being able to read or write.

Here's a subject rife with opportunities for great comedy, and there should be great comedy about teachers or a mockumentary-style television series about public education. This does get a lot right even though it's not really very funny at all. One of the titular teachers, the one his co-workers not-very-affectionately refer to as "Ditto," has great classroom management skills, sitting at the back of the room behind an elevated desks where he usually falls asleep reading the newspaper while his students pass out worksheet after worksheet and quietly work. I worked with a guy like that for a few years. Ditto's demise in this movie is a great bit of dark comedy. A lot of the comedy exaggerates your typical rough public school issues, but a lot of it actually manages to ring true. While a fight over a copy machine, a principal closing the door to avoid problems, a kid with a stab wound, a collection of weapons on the principal's desk, and the question "Which teacher is the father?" aren't really things I've experienced in the schools that I've worked in, some of this did make me chuckle with recognition. A union representative promising the teachers to get the powers-that-be to agree on a 7:38 start time instead of 7:35 is just the type of petty bother that gets in the way of real issues school corporations should address, and I loved the lounge conversation that occurs between one seasoned veteran and a substitute who literally just got out of a mental institution and sort-of snuck into the building:

Veteran: "He read at a sixth grade level. He couldn't do the work. I didn't know what to do with him."
Crazy guy: "How about teach him to read better?"

That the substitute ends up teaching circles around everybody else is probably telling. I also liked a discussion in a class about the responsibility of a school to its community: a babysitter, money for the teachers, helping kids be able to get jobs, teach about "Hiawatcha". This isn't always very good, probably meandering a little too much for most people and ending with some of the most ludicrous gratuitous nudity you'll ever see, but it's got a really good cast. It's Crispin Glover's role right before Back to the Future, and in his first scene, you get to see him bite a teacher's wrist. He gets a great scream, and says awesome things that your typical teenager says like "Have we got balls or not? Fucking great! Give me five!" which sounds odd and unnatural only because there's nothing typical about Crispin Glover. Ralph Macchio has a bigger role. This came out right after The Karate Kid apparently. It's hard to take Macchio seriously since he's playing the type of kid who would dress up as a skeleton and beat people up instead of a youngster who needs the guidance of an old Japanese man. Nick Nolte's fine as the lead, and Judd Hirsch, Laura Dern, and Morgan Freeman are also in there. And there's a kid who's wearing an Orioles batting helmet (the 80's kind without the ear flaps) that made me want to try out that same look.