Hey, Headmaster

Lessons learned: Students Lockwood (Andrew Knott, left) and Dakin (Dominic Cooper, right) are trying to gain admittance to exclusive universities in The History Boys. (Alex Bailey/Fox Searchlight Films)

On screen, the inspirational teacher is busy, busy, busy, though not with the marking and lesson planning and government exams that lead real-life teachers to mainlining coffee and career counselling. No, the inspirational teacher of the movies is busy rousing the slag, maybe rescuing the occasional gang member or making a trip (in his crappy teacher car) to the projects to set someone on the path to righteousness, or at least state college. And that flapping sound in the final act of every inspirational teacher movie from To Sir With Love through Dangerous Minds (including the ugly sister sub-genre of Inspirational Coach movies)? Why, that’s the sound of spirits soaring.

All of this is well and good — pity the student who has never felt changed, for a moment or a lifetime, by a wise educator — but it has always seemed strange that there is very little actual teaching in movies about school. Book learning is usually relegated to a couple of musical montages of “teach” doing drills at the blackboard or strolling the aisles, finger to lip, as the kids sweat out a pivotal exam.

The History Boys is different. It takes place almost entirely in the classroom, and when not in the classroom, it turns the world outside the school’s windows into a classroom. In Thatcher’s England in 1983, a group of smart boys — and one jug-eared jock — from a scruffy Yorkshire high school are candidates for “Oxbridge,” that academic Holy Grail portmanteau of Oxford and Cambridge. Driven by a salivating headmaster eager to gild the school’s reputation, the boys spend one final semester cramming for the entrance exam. During these weeks, two very different figures vie for their hearts and minds (and pants, sort of): Hector (Richard Griffiths), the poetry-spouting literature teacher who believes in capital T truth in art  (if not in life — he’s a married pederast), and Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), the twenty-something freckle-faced history teacher who knows that what matters in the modern academy is clever dissent. After morning bell, Irwin coaches his boys that the ability to construct a radical argument is more important than the content of that argument. Next period, Hector encourages exuberant re-enactments of scenes from Now, Voyageur and W.H. Auden recitation marathons.

The two teachers are not exactly rivals, though they see in one another, with differing responses, the end of an era. Their pedagogical yin-yang comes together when the boys sit in a circle with both teachers to discuss, if that’s the right word, the Holocaust. Hector and his minions assert that this genocide is unrepresentable/unfathomable while Irwin nudges the boys to see it as precedented/predictable, and the ensuing debate is smart, witty, literate and a little dangerous. A bad Inspirational Teacher theme song by Coolio or Lulu just wouldn’t fit in somehow, though the movie makes judicious use of the Clash and New Order, theme music of angst-ridden 80s youth (the pants are riding high and tight on the hips of these boys, just like I remember them, unfortunately).

Richard Griffiths delivers a phenomenal performance as Hector, a literature teacher. (Alex Bailey/Fox Searchlight Films)

Before it became a movie, The History Boys was a hit play in London and on Broadway. Even if you didn’t know this going in, all will become clear after a half-dozen brainy monologues show up in the first 10 minutes. Written by Alan Bennett, the dialogue is erudite and scathing, each line a perfect pellet. The performances are big but beautifully enunciated, and ideas cascade like Beyoncé’s weave. Occasionally, a student will burst into a version of Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered piano-side, much to Hector’s delight. In other words: what the hell is this thing doing on the screen? Director Nicholas Hytner does nothing inventive with his transplant; the cast is the same (and excellent), the sets are uninspired, the staging stagy. Still, the play is so strong that the film almost works, even though something about it feels slightly off, especially in a wince-making dream coda. The History Boys, the movie, is like a Dolly sheep; somehow not quite the real deal. It made me really want to see The History Boys, the play.

One thing Hytner gets right is the sexual charge that electrifies this all-boys school. Even though the actors are looking a bit long in the tooth now — the play was first staged two years ago — they aren’t the kind of aging movie teens who look like they should be getting regular prostate checkups. These boys are still greasy and horned-up in an authentic way (just like I remember them, unfortunately). Sex in a boys’ school is a complicated matter — well, maybe not just in a boys’ school. The best student, Posner (Samuel Barnett), is in love with the best-looking, Dakin (Dominic Cooper), who is sleeping with the secretary and eyeing Irwin. Meanwhile, Irwin is noticing his own gay tendencies while Hector is always eager to give his students a ride home on his motorcycle. But this is no abuse tragedy: the boys roll their eyes and fend off his advances with well-placed Tudor Economics textbooks.

The film is really Hector’s, and Griffiths makes him a poignant, complicated figure. To the boys, Hector is beloved, but also a joke (isn’t that, sadly, how teenagers see their favourite teachers?): an obese Humpty Dumpty so overflowing with a contradictory mix of wisdom and unfulfilled longing that when he opens his mouth, it often sounds like white noise. But he is not a villain, not the convenient plot-device pedophile known from movies of the week. As Hector says: “One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to tell them.” Yet when Hector discovers that he may lose his job, he is crushed; teaching is his lifeblood, and at the thought of it staunched, he comes apart. In the film’s best scene, Hector sits in an otherwise empty classroom with Posner and the two analyze Thomas Hardy’s poem Drummer Hodge, about the burial of a forgotten country soldier. When Hector breaks down, the student sees in this man his own possible future, with terror and with love.

Stellar performances are everywhere in The History Boys, but I was especially taken by Frances de la Tour in the underwritten part of the school’s lone female presence. She describes her job as history teacher ferociously: “History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.” Oh, to have seen de la Tour deliver those lines on a stage! Live, they would feel immediate and urgent, instead of too big for the screen and too much like a lecture. Bennett’s rhythm is particular to theatre, where ears are cocked and one isn’t awaiting the visual cues of cinema. Hytner doesn’t let us breathe Bennett’s language in the way that film demands; the talk is brilliant, but it never lets up long enough to savour.

Exam question: Are some texts simply written for the theatre and hampered by the screen, where one awaits a certain kind of silence in which to relish even the most important lessons? Discuss, supporting your argument with The History Boys.

The History Boys opens Nov. 24.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.  

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