The History Boys, an Alan Bennett play about a group of rough diamond schoolboys in Sheffield who learn about life and literature from their loveably porky teacher who gropes them any chance he gets, was a smash hit, winning three (West End) Olivier Awards in 2005 and a record six Tonys in 2006, before touring successfuly around the globe.
The material's stage success augurs little for an engaging cinematic adaptation - could even Peter Jackson manage to turn Cats into a watchable film? - and everything that can possibly go wrong in transferring a stage show to the silver screen, goes wrong in this movie version of The History Boys. Drab and unimaginatively filmed, the movie is really little more than a souvenir for fans of the popular original, rather like Joel Schumacher's colorful but loyal capture of The Phantom of the Opera, the DVD of which my mother watches regularly, all the time regaling all comers with tales of how that hit muscial "really looked" each of the fourteen times she saw it in Sydney, Melbourne and London.
The actors are (almost) all original cast from the London production and perform here like they've turned up to a media call on Thursday afternoon, and are duplicating their well-rehearsed stage performances for the cameras. They call their dialogue to the balconies and carve their characterisations into thick archetypes instantly clear to the sleepy ushers up the back. Some of the actors have real charisma but it's hidden under the rote and dustiness of a year's sell out run. Scenes that take us out of the fourth wall format, such as a mini-bus borne school excursion to an historical site, are done begrudgingly, in haste, and only put the stagey theatrics of the cast in even more grating relief.
The story's pedophilic homosexual thread is presented with disingenuous insouciance, as though a team of homosexual teachers who fondle their pupils' balls is a par-for-the-course plot point. Elsewhere, a new male teacher immediately falls desperately and rather lecherously in love with the dark-eyed cad of the class while at the drop of a hat, any two boys will jump to the front of the class and campily act out scenes from Now, Voyager and Brief Encounter. Just like your high school, right?
Alan Bennett went to school in Yorkshire before following his disinterested high school love-object into a degree in history at Oxford - the tertiary Holy Grail of the Boys - and his nostalgic biographical hand is all too visible in the clunky slush-draft script of this film.
Bennett is too distracted by his fantasy memory of a utopian queer school paradise where sweaty dreamed-of boys harbour latent homo desires and Athenian man-boy sex modes of teaching are the order of the day to write his script correctly. Missing are any references to the film's 1983 setting beyond repetitious use of crashing synth chords noisily overlaying naff montage sequences of, for instance, the boys geekily hitting the library to bone up for exams, or any substantial character development that takes any one of the roles beyond three-word descriptions such as the fat cheery boy, the lusty lady killer, the unrequited gay dreamer and the loveable sporty lunkhead. A last minute plot twist is contrived and out of all context, and a final scene flash-forward that blabs the future careers and destinies of the Boys is trite in the extreme. Dead Poets Society looks like The Birds compared to this bizarre and ill-concieved queer tale, and for that matter, even Dangerous Minds looks like a masterpiece in comparison.
I never saw the madly popular stage version of The History Boys, but I felt like I had after I sat through this almost amateurish and strange, two-dimensional version of it.
Related Reading
The Everlasting Secret Family
Review by Mark Adnum
Your Comments
1. And yet i loved it.
by: John Calendo, Thursday May 24
All fields required; all comments will be published.
