What makes this film so appealing is that it practices what it preaches, treating viewers like intelligent adults and throwing in plenty of ‘sheer, calculated silliness.’
By: Elise Nakhnikian
"He was a good man, but I don’t think there’s time for his kind of teaching now," says Irwin of Hector in The History Boys.<</i>br>
I hope he’s wrong can’t a great teacher find room even in the most regulated curriculum to educate and inspire? But that feeling, a sort of nostalgia for the story even as it unfolds, suffuses this screenplay, adding a patina of poignancy to a generally upbeat tale about the power of a good education.
Hector (Richard Griffiths), who teaches "general studies," makes his classroom an unstructured space, where his students are as likely to act out a scene from a ’40s melodrama as to recite a poem. He and his friend and colleague Mrs. Lintott (Frances de la Tour), who teaches history, are spending an extra summer in the British equivalent of high school, tutoring a group of eight boys who just got the best A-level scores the school has ever seen. Although the boys have just graduated, their prig of a headmaster wants to up their odds of being accepted by Oxford or Cambridge, giving them some extra polish. "They’re clever," he sniffs, "but they’re crass."
The headmaster imports Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore) a teacher "only five minutes older than we are," as one of the boys points out to school them in how to game the system and wow the dons in their entrance exams and interviews. While Hector sees learning as a way of illuminating and enriching the inner life, Irwin sees it as lighting the path to material success. The verses and quotes Hector teaches the boys are mere "gobbits" to Irwin, good only for sprinkling onto essays like so much grated parmesan. But if Irwin’s the serpent invading this academic Eden, he turns out to be a surprisingly sympathetic one.
That may be largely the doing of the actor who portrays him, who does a riveting job of bringing to life a sensitive young man struggling to master his emotions. Poker-faced and sardonic at first, Irwin soon becomes vulnerable, and Moore can convey volcanic emotional shifts with just a blush or a sideways glance.
But screenwriter Alan Bennett also wants us to give this devil his due. Bennett, who adapted the movie from his own play, created the character of Hector because, as a youth, he always longed for a teacher like him. He clearly sees Irwin as part of the debasing of intellectual life in an era that values the appearance of original thinking over the real thing, yet he seems to be a little seduced by his credo of style over substance. When Dakin (Dominic Cooper), the natural leader of the boys and the one nearly everyone else is in love with, comes up with a theory of "subjunctive history" that blends Hector’s teachings with Irwin’s, we can’t help but share Irwin’s admiration. After all, Dakin has just pulled off a neat little feat even if, as Hector would say: "It’s flip; it’s glib; it’s journalism."
Griffiths, de la Tour and Moore were all in the original play in London, as were the actors who play the boys. As a result, the boys look a bit too old for their parts (the play opened in spring 2004), but they inhabit the roles with authority.
As for the teachers, all three are marvelous. De la Tour, who looks like a slightly homely Allison Janney from The West Wing, gives the straight-shooting Mrs. Lintott a bracing wryness that makes it easy to buy the boys’ love for her. And Griffiths, who uses his roly-poly body much as Charles Laughton did, creating fastidious and self-loathing characters who look like some lard-creature from a Miyazaki movie, plays a closeted homosexual here. He lets us see Hector’s work as a gilded trap his only source of joy and his greatest source of frustration.
The boys themselves are less distinct. With the exception of Dakin and Posner (Samuel Barnett), their surface differences remain their only distinguishing characteristics, so we wind up where we started, with the plump and good-natured one, the handsome Christian, the not-so-bright jock, and so on. We barely see the boys at all outside of school, and when we do it’s in wordless montages.
That kind of shorthand character development usually bothers me in a movie, but it didn’t here. That’s partly because everything the boys do and say feels authentic, but it’s probably mostly because there’s so much life in the class as a whole. The joking affection amongst the boys and between them and their teachers always feels three-dimensional, even when some of the individual boys do not.
Compared to gaseous Hollywood attempts to portray the teacher-student bond like Dead Poets Society, Mr. Holland’s Opus and Good Will Hunting, Bennett’s screenplay is bracingly brisk, witty and free of coyness, false humility, and self-pity. Also refreshing is the matter-of-fact way in which the boys and their teachers accept each other’s foibles. "They know everything," Hector says of the boys, and so they do, giving everyone’s secrets a good airing as they talk and tease. An American movie would almost surely pathologize or punish a character like Hector, who likes to grope his boys while they ride behind him on his motorcycle, but The History Boys, like the history boys, eyes his actions with compassion and a dollop of perspective-restoring humor.
In the end, this movie seems to say, the best teachers are those rare birds who can respect us for what we already know, love us for who we are, and nurture our innate desire to learn more. What makes The History Boys so appealing is that it practices what it preaches, treating us like intelligent adults, throwing in plenty of "sheer, calculated silliness" to entertain us, and asking only that we think for ourselves.
Rated R for language and sexual content.

