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Easy A: Meet teachers from fictional schools who are top of their class
As The Holdovers comes to screens in India, a tip of the hat to teachers from recent films who battle the odds in unusual ways, but still find ways to lead.
Can you hear that?” says principal Stacy Woods, when an indignant student storms into her office to complain about her favourite teacher quitting, in the Australian Netflix series Heartbreak High (2022-).
“What?”
“Listen.”
“I can’t hear anything.”
“No, you can’t, because teaching is a calling…”
Not everyone gets the call. Not even all teachers do.
Think of the titular Bad Teacher (Cameron Diaz), in the raunchy 2011 comedy, who works incredibly hard to get her class scores up, so she can win a special bonus and get breast implants.
Well, that’s fiction. In the real world, almost everyone has had at least one memorable teacher who changed them for the better. It is an experience so universal that it has inspired advertisements (among the most evocative of these, a Raymond ad, featuring a gift of fabric in a large box, left in a vintage car, on a teacher’s last day). It’s an experience that has inspired poems, songs (plenty, from Abba to Bollywood, through the years), and of course films and series.
Every child wants a Miss Honey, the natural-born guardian who protects the neglected little Matilda with the red bow in her hair. Harry Potter’s Hogwarts is a veritable feast of remarkable faculty. Further back, there’s Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939; based on the 1934 novel by James Hilton), in which the titular character sees his students through World War 1.
Lately, these idealised depictions have given way to teachers who are flawed, struggling, but still leading the way.
One such character is Paul Hunham in The Holdovers (2023; now streaming in India). Among its five Oscar nominations was one for Best Actor, for Paul Giamatti. He lost to Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer), but that’s only what Hunham would have expected. The film is an evocative look at loss, regret, fear (that dreadfully entwined kind, of success and failure). It’s a moving tale about the different ways in which a torch may be lit, and passed. And how, no matter how old one is, it will eventually be time to leave the safety of campus.
Here, then, is a look at teachers in recent films who may have failed some of life’s tests, but whose lessons are perhaps more memorable for it.
Fall guy: Hunham is, let’s be honest, a bit of a loser. He is both mopey and strict, he seems out of date. He tosses obscure facts from ancient history into conversation. He’s a bit of a laughing stock among students and faculty at Barton Academy in New England. But perhaps that’s because this is a world in which ethics seem like an absurd way to make a choice.
Enter Angus Tully, an overgrown, angry problem child with nowhere to go during the Christmas holiday. Hunham is tasked with keeping an eye on him. They spend the two weeks in the company of cafeteria manager Mary Lamb (played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who did win her Oscar, for Best Supporting Actress).
Bit by bit, in quiet conversations, revelations seep out about shattered dreams, lost loves, the pain of living in a world that moves on, unseeing and indifferent. There is the sharp ache, all around, of unfulfilled promise. And then suddenly, a chance for a fresh start. As with all things, it isn’t a stroke of luck for Hunham, but it is one that he can extend to someone else.
Will he still do the right thing, if he has nothing to gain? Of course he will. What if he has everything to lose? As it turns out, the answer is still yes.
By heart: In The Whale (2022), Brendan Fraser plays Charlie, a talented, reclusive and severely obese English teacher on a self-destructive mission, driven by unprocessed grief and guilt. He holds classes online, keeping himself largely hidden. He offers valuable lessons on harmony and clarity of thought, while battling to find these himself.
He manages to reach out to his estranged teenage daughter, not as the father who left and has now returned, but as a professional recognising her talent for the written word, a talent he did little to exploit in himself. It’s a dark but compelling tale: Sometimes the greatest gift a teacher can give, is lessons in what not to do.
Say the word: Based in real life, the German film Mr Bachmann and his Class (2021) is about a school teacher whose class of 12- and 14-year-olds in Stadtallendorf in central Germany is now a rainbow of mixed cultures.
Dieter Bachmann, who teaches music, math and languages and is well-loved, must find ways to show the youngsters from Germany and from Turkey, Bulgaria and Russia how to navigate each other’s identities. Added challenges come from sexist bullying, homophobia and violence between students; he must navigate these in a way that will neither condone nor alienate the young offender.
“That’s a focus in this film because Herr Bachmann basically turns his classroom into a kind of living room where — and I think this is extremely important — the kids feel at home. It’s a place of trust, of safety, where they are seen and where they can show who they are as individuals, as people. That’s what the film is about,” director Maria Speth said in an interview with Hollywood Reporter in 2021. The 217-minute documentary earned Speth the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Soul train: A pre-fame Ryan Gosling (he would make it big five years later, in Crazy, Stupid, Love) plays Dan Dunne, a Brooklyn middle-school history teacher, in the 2006 film Half Nelson. He is engaging and innovative in class, sparks dialogue and debate.
By night, he battles a cocaine addiction. Can a student who has recently begun peddling drugs for the local dealer help him out?
The rest of his students don’t see the teacher struggle; few students ever do. The classroom, then, becomes a place where he must be his best self. What emerges is a passionate and intelligent man with the humility and empathy to use a dialectic method and an amended curriculum to greater effect.
The role earned Gosling an Oscar nomination.
Altitude adjustment: Ugyen Dorji (played by Sherab Dorji) is an aspiring singer in Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan, and he is a teacher in training, because his career in music just won’t seem to take off.
When the government postings arrive, he finds that he has been assigned to a remote shack of a school in Lunana, a tiny village in the mountains, several hours’ hike from the nearest road.
Ugyen arrives angry, treks uphill. There, he is given the gift of a yak, so he can use its dung to make a fire. He begins to care for the yak, and then the people. He learns their ways, becomes a fixture in village life.
He hears a woman sing to no audience but the mountains she loves.
He completes his stint and leaves, rejoins the world, ends up with a job performing at a bar in Australia. No one’s listening, so he starts to sing the song the woman sang to the mountains.
Directed by Pawo Choyning Dorji, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (2019) became the first Bhutanese film ever nominated for an Oscar.
In its delicate tale is the reminder that we are always learning, or unlearning. And that, perhaps more important than the dream, is the idea that we can change it.
