| Overall Grade: |
A- |
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| Story: |
A |
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| Acting: |
A+ |
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| Direction: |
B |
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| Visuals: |
B+ |
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To Serve Them All My Chips
by Renato (movies profile)
Nov 3, 2007
28
of
33 people found this review helpful
I'm British, and a product of an all-female boarding school (and a lover of history to boot), which is light years away from this comprehensive in the wilds of Sheffield.
But for all the dissimilarities of experience, I will bet all of us have had similar memories that The History Boys conjures up in this film.
- The plodding, earnest, but oft-hypocritical headmaster (-mistress/principal)
- The standout teacher whose personal foibles are often the attraction to his students, and who in fact, sometimes become protective of him because of these
- The loner teacher, who seems even less at home with his own kind, than with his students (s/he is usually young)
- The class misfit, the class hunk/beauty, the nondescript student (who has surprising depth if you bothered to take the plunge), the class ace student
They are what the character of Posner, our requisite, tortured homosexual youngster, calls "stock characters".
But before you start to shudder that there have been many films and series who already have peddled these characters successfully on the screen, that's where we are given the rarity of feeling as a twist.
Very rarely do you see an ensemble cast have such chemistry on-screen as they did on-stage. The recent "The Producers", in fact, was a testament that sometimes stagework should be left at the door of the theatre.
But in Alan Bennett's The History of Boys, that fluidity, that rapidity, that lack of coyness actors have when they are well-acquainted with their characters, is very much in evidence here.
Some of the complaints about The History Boys come from British critics who scoffed that this is "To Serve Them all my Chips", a comical allusion to the series drama To Serve Them all My Days, and of course, the beloved, Goodbye, Mr. Chips. It has the smell of old news, they seem to be implying.
But this is where they are wrong.
Few films concentrate so vividly on the already well-honed intellect of scholar hopefuls, on the brink of life itself.
Most films, Dangerous Minds or Stand and Deliver come immediately to mind, portray students whose lives are an impediment to their learning. With the help of that one teacher who cared, they begin to make babysteps to true intellectual growth.
Where THB differs, is that ALL the teachers are geared to only one thing -- helping their charges enter that golden educational door known as Oxbridge.
Moreover, with the exception of one character (who offers the best line of the film, in a film which is almost embarrassingly quotable), they are all brains.
They know their stuff. What they need, is to learn how to put it together for a purpose. And to decide if this purpose is truth, or not.
Those are the undercurrent themes of this charming, uplifting but never sentimental film.
Here is a laundry list of good and bad, which you can use, appositely, as a Cliffs Notes for it:
Good
Acting (Richard Griffiths, and Frankie De La Tour)
Dialogue and Composition (Rarely has there been a more captivating scene on celluloid, than the Brief Encounter hommage)
Scenery (combining the drabness of their local haunts, with the possibilities of England's architectural wealth)
Bad
Direction (unspeakably dull)
Writing-Translation to Film (it practically yells out "I was a play once!", with all the stageyness that implies)
Other than that, it was one of the best films I've seen this year, which has not yielded much outside of Half-Nelson and the Last King of Scotland. |
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