An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this flick but since there was a decent cast involved, I thought I might as well check it out. I remember that it had been a huge flop when it was released but, in fact, I think it actually had some potential. Unfortunately, even though the material was utterly depressing but still really topical, they went for an upbeat inspiring tone which was rather misguided. Furthermore, this movie clearly suffered from the ‘Dead Poets Society’ syndrome. Indeed, such movies, instead of actually focusing on the noble cause which was supposedly what the movie was supposed to be about, actually prefers to focus on the main characters and their outgoing personality. In ‘Dead Poets Society’, you got plenty of rousing speeches from John Keating but actually very little poetry. In this case, they spent much of the duration showing how brave and resourceful these two women were and also showing their respective home situations but, eventually, they spend very little time explaining what was actually really wrong at their school and how they were going to fix this. Concerning the cast, I think that Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis gave some solid performances, even if their characters were rather poorly written. Gyllenhaal was basically playing some kind of variation of Erin Brockovich and it was probably not a great idea to have her character starting a relationship with one of the teachers. Concerning Davis, the focus on her private life was also a big mistake. Indeed, if you might wonder why Jamie Fitzpatrick didn’t help her kid instead of fighting her battles against the school system, at least, you could argue that she didn’t have the necessary bagage to properly help her out herself. With Nona Alberts, it was a different story though. Indeed, sure, her kid was struggling at school but, come on, his mother was a freaking teacher so she could basically tutor him 1-to-1 for about one hour everyday which is a luxury that most of the kids going to this damned school didn’t have. Anyway, to conclude, even if the damned thing didn’t really work, it was still dealing with a very important subject and, only therefore, I think it is actually worth a look.