DEAD POETS SOCIETY
With Robin Williams, Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, Josh Charles, and Kurtwood Smith.
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Elite private schools like Eton in England or Groton here appear in cinema as shimmery objects of nervous nostalgia (Tom Brown’s School Days [1940, remake 1951], A Separate Peace [1972]) or else as insidious institutions that warp their inmates and so deserve destruction. In this subversive vein Jean Vigo’s Zero de conduite (1933) and Lindsay Anderson’s If . . . (1968) depict private schools as indoctrination camps where students–wised up to the tricks of corrupt elders–are driven to revolt. A little learning, contrary to the words of dead poet Alexander Pope, is not a dangerous thing; not if it is dispensed in regulated doses to compliant pupils by paddle-wielding pedagogues. In these fine and private institutions, knowledge is threatening only if privileged students challenge the very authorities who “process” them for successful careers–an unlikely prospect. But it can happen. In their celluloid realms, however, Vigo and Anderson treat school settings not only as crucibles in which to study the courage and character of youth in conflict with imperious pedants but also as symbolic battlefields where wider social issues–inequality, bigotry, militarism, etc–come nakedly into play. Ignore the latter and all you have are tales of the travails of wealthy brats wallowing in standard teenage angst amid their pompous circumstances.
Keating commences shaking up this mild bunch, scaling the heady heights of his desk, performing an impromptu bit of poetic faith healing, reciting Shakespeare via John Wayne–all this and more at what is for Robin Williams a relatively phlegmatic pace. His transcendent message, his thrilling command to these oppressed scions? Carpe diem, buckaroos, seize the day! (Shades of Williams’s role in the PBS broadcast a few years ago of Saul Bellow’s novel of that title.) Do it. Go for the gusto. You were made to go out and get her. Be all that you can be. You might get better advice from a fortune cookie.
