Dead Poets Society (1989)
By PaulThis is a battle, a war, and the casualties could be your hearts and souls.
Films like this one, in which an unconventional teacher inspires his students to be something more than what’s expected of them, are common enough to constitute a minor genre on their own. In addition to Dead Poets Society, we’ve seen Mr. Holland’s Opus, Dangerous Minds and Stand and Deliver. Those are just the ones that I could name off the top of my head.
Peter Weir’s film concerns itself with an exclusive boy’s prep school known as the Welton Academy, which seems to exist to mold young men into future Ivy Leaguers, whether they like it or not. Robin Williams plays John Keating, a Welton alumnus returned to replace the school’s recently retired english teacher. Robert Sean Leonard plays Neil Perry, a student with dreams of becoming an actor, against the wishes of his father (Kurtwood Smith), who sees only medical school in his son’s future. Ethan Hawke is Todd Anderson, a shy Welton legacy whose distant family sees the school more as a distant, expensive baby sitter.
The problem and chief irony of Dead Poets Society is that this film, which urges students to Carpe Diem (”seize the day”) and break free from mindless conformity, is so slavishly cliched. From the beginning of the film, the battlelines are drawn in pure black and white, with no hint of subtlety. The school’s administration, represented by the rigid, almost calcified Mr. Nolan (Normal Lloyd) is the oppressive enemy of free expression only because the needs of the plot require such an enemy to exist.
The “rebellion” of a few students, including Neil and Todd, takes the form of resurrecting Keatings old “club,” the Dead Poets Society, a looseknit band of students who meet in a damp cave and read poetry to each other. The trouble is that the film never bothers to establish how they were inspired to do that. Sure, Keating’s methods are unconventional, but this cause is never satisfactorily connected dramatically to its onscreen effect. Keating stands on his desk, does an impression of Marlon Brando performing Shakespeare and, bang, his students are reading poetry in a cave.
Robin Williams’ performance deserves note. Most of the time he’s effective and convincing as a senstive, intelligent and literate man, but then he starts in with the Brando and John Wayne impressions and you get the feeling the film was taking the easy way out. It would have been much more “inspiring” to have Robin Williams play the unconventional teacher without resorting to recognizable schtick. The filmmakers should have taken notice that the only non-animated film to successfully integrate Williams’ comic persona into its story was Good Morning, Vietnam.
Neil’s conflict with his father leads to a tragic but melodramatic and predictable climax, which leads to a predictable fate for John Keating, which leads to a predictable final act of defiance by his students. This is one of those films that ends exactly how you know it will fifteen minutes into watching it. Rather than seizing the day, Dead Poets Society dutifully plays it by the numbers.
About the author:
Paul's cat has violent mood swings between ennui and apathy.
December 4th, 2005 at 2:34 pm
Carpe Crap. Saw this film when it was first released while at a novel workshop in Palm Springs. Disliked it then, still do. I don’t know, I grew up during the late 60’s and early 70’s, standing on a desk as a sign of rebellion. Whatever.
December 8th, 2005 at 1:57 pm
I’ve read numerous critical reviews today. Not sure who was more scathing here, Christopher or Paul.
Actually these two quotes alone could have been good reviews:
“Rather than seizing the day, Dead Poets Society dutifully plays it by the numbers.”
And
“I don’t know, I grew up during the late 60’s and early 70’s, standing on a desk as a sign of rebellion. Whatever.”
July 29th, 2007 at 3:38 am
DEAFENING SILENCE & LOUD NOISE
In my last decade as a full-time professional teacher, the film Dead Poets Society was released(1989). I saw the film some time in the 1990s just before retiring. I saw it again tonight on a DVD my son brought on one of his weekend visits. The film was set in 1959 the year I joined the Baha’i Faith. I won’t summarize the story-line here, but I will contextualize it in terms of my own life and of society’s in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
There is a strong emphasis in the film on the poet, the individual, finding his own voice, his freedom, his liberation from tradition; a philosophy of thinking for one’s self, a giving-in to impulse, to feeling is at the centre of this film. In 1959 the notion of self-realization was not yet the pop-psych cliché it became in the ‘60s and sheer impulse had yet to become the bi-word of the freewheeling rock-‘n’-roll sixties. Walt Whitman, the supreme poet of personality, is the only poet quoted at length in the film.
-Ron Price with thanks to Pamela A. Rooks, “Woo who? Exclusion of otherness in Dead Poets Society,” Australian Journal of Communication, Vol.18, No.2, 1991, pp.75-83.
Still, Peter, I liked your film.1
I did not even know about the
Ivy League schools back then,
but school was about doing what
you were told to do and keeping
your passions well-hidden with
sport and studying…..and a new
religion which came onto the block
back then in those quiet ‘50s and
insensibly moved to the centre of
my life long after sport had moved
to the periphery and it stayed with
me long after girls became marriage
and I had to knuckle-down to routine,
paying bills, mortgages, faithfulness
and what some called the harder virtues.
I needed to find my voice, Peter, no doubt
about it–our whole generation did–as those
prevailing systems and human values were
rapidly breaking down; my world was loosing
its moral moorings, ethical reference points
swept away with passionate intensities filling
the emotions of those who knew so little
and convictions deserting the minds and
hearts of the best: result–deafening silence
and loud noises and rhythms everywhere.
1 Peter Weir, the director
Ron Price
28 July 2007