The History Boys Release Date: November 21, 2006 Starring: Richard Griffiths, Dominic Cooper, Samuel Barnett, Clive Merrison Directed by: Nicholas Hytner
The idea of what it means to be smart has been undergoing some pretty serious changes over the past 50 years, and “book-smartness” (along with its corollary, the idea that knowledge is a grand thing in and of itself) has ended up taking a particularly bad beating. Zeitgeist-watchers and sensitive bookworms have been watching the drubbing ever since that old Father Knows Best episode that made cruel sport of a nerdy preteen on account of her undue enthusiasm for Sartre's Nausea (turns out all she really wanted was to be popular at dances!). But anti-education as an actual government stance saw its full flower, some will tell you, during the reigns of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister of the U.K. and Ronald Reagan as president of the United States. One of the people who would tell you so would likely be Alan Bennett, from whose play of the same name this Nicholas Hytner-directed movie is adapted. Bennett's story—set in 1983, early in the Thatcher era—revolves around a group of super-bright North England grammar school boys in a frenzy to gain admission to Oxford. Their longtime schoolmaster Hector (Richard Griffiths) is a rambling eclecticist whose lessons encompass poetry, show tunes, and much in between (and whose ineffectual pederasty is a source of much mirth for the students who otherwise admire him). But the school's headmaster (an almost too-twitty Clive Merrison), like Thatcher in all things, wants results—that is, the biggest number of Oxford admissions. To that end, he enlists a new, young, sharp-as-a-tack instructor (Stephen Campbell Moore) who's all about epistemological razzle-dazzle. Bennett quite astutely hits on what's completely not conservative about the putatively conservative approach to education—the relativism, moral and otherwise, it entails. “But what do I care?” you might ask, and I understand your question. The thing is, even if you don't give a fig about educational policies conservative or liberal, The History Boys is a pretty grand and juicy entertainment. Its scholastic intrigues are of course only part of the story, and the sexual tensions, both between the students and between teacher and students, are handled with a frankness and a fair-mindedness that's rare. Hytner stumbles every now and then when trying to add some pop pizzazz to Bennett's already fizzy script; the rock music-backed montages of the students Doing Stuff is precisely what material like this doesn't need. But there's no one today writing English dialogue as sharp as Bennett's, and hearing it delivered expertly is a pleasure worth sitting through some dodgy montages for. —Glenn Kenny
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