REVIEW
THE EMPEROR'S CLUB
Starring Kevin Kline
Directed by Michael Hoffman
Opens Friday, November 22
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Going where so many films have gone before, The Emperor's Club manages to distinguish itself from the mass of syrupy tales of triumph in the classroom by offering up a less dynamic incarnation of the "beloved teacher" character and the values he's trying to impart to his students.
Bearing an eerie resemblance to Dead Poets Society, this Kevin Kline vehicle is set during the ’70s at a posh boarding school, with its basic distinction being the style and approach of its professor. While Robin Williams urged his tight-lipped pupils to carpe diem in his English class, with impressions of John Wayne doing Hamlet and impromptu poetry readings on the soccer field, Kline's tight-lipped teacher tries to inspire his class the good old-fashioned way: with the work itself. Here the subject is the classics, and the action is centred on Kline's struggle to straighten out his most wayward student (Emile Hirsch), the spoiled and embittered son of a powerful senator.
Unsure which cliché about teaching it's trying to pass on, The Emperor's Club squanders multiple opportunities to explore interesting topics about honesty, passion and the real point of education. Hung on a single action, the film chronicles the lasting effect of its impassioned and painfully honest teacher's one mistake: changing a grade. But, refusing to focus on its characters and delve into their motivations and fears, The Emperor's Club plays out like an uninspired snapshot of a classroom through the years.
Where Dead Poets Society filled the screen with trite but glamorized images of the teacher who instills his students with a passion for life, The Emperor's Club lacks such grandeur. Unfortunately, the less glamorous approach to displaying education at work does nothing to create a grittier or more interesting film – ultimately, The Emperor's Club spits out the same tired line about how knowledge and learning should conquer all, but without saying why.
The film is unwilling to admit the more discomfiting and complex reality that, in and of itself, education is a means and not an end, and that its usefulness is rarely "practical." Teaching about history, particularly ancient civilizations, is something of a precarious job, since we live in a society which is obsessed with seeing tangible results – something education doesn't often offer. By and large, we still haven't quite figured out what the point of teaching is. The Emperor's Club certainly doesn't shed any light on that question, either. |
