The History Boys
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Actor: Frances de la Tour, James Corden, Richard Griffiths, Samuel Anderson, Stephen Campbell MooreBrand: Fox
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 109 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-04-17
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
DVD Reviews of The History Boys
DVD Review: Brilliant, Shakespearean
Summary: 5 Stars
This tightly crafted and brilliant film would be, and probably is, an excellent introduction to modern British drama in college-preparatory American schools from Grade 9 because it's about a topic many students can relate to.
The problem, as some of the negative reviews at this site make clear, is that America is in a serious moral panic, and is using "zero tolerance" of even venial and de minimis conduct such as Hector's with a signal lack of success to prevent much more serious and widespread problem of physical and sexual abuse within nuclear families, a problem most prevalant in America's most Fundamentalist, and zero-tolerant, regions.
Not to mention (oh, what the hell) the fact that Americans can seriously entertain, and get their rocks off about, their own government torturing people.
Which should tell us something.
My experience: the teacher should say to boys especially, who are mature enough, something like:
"Right you lot, there are some 'gay' issues raised in this film, but it's about academic success in a competitive world during a time when you are looking for an identity and under considerable stress in your studies. These issues, men, are a sideline and not as important as being loyal and kind to your friends and magnaminous to your enemies, who you shall overcome if your cause is just, and you fight the good fight".
"Furthermore, you lot, this movie resolves the tension between preparing for tests and actually learning a bloody thing or two for love of the game, by showing you that the best way to pass the test is NOT to cheat, or swot the night before, but to try to understand and love literature, art, and the rest of that girl stuff the best you can. Or else play golf as best you can and have a father who was a college servant."
"For one thing, your knowledge will impress the ladies no end if that is your desire, as it normally, but not universally, is. Right? Right."
This, especially when delivered brisk and in sergeant-major style (whether in the style of the USMC or in the style of Horse Guards as above) will short-circuit most of the sniggers and guffaws. My own high school English teacher assigned "Linda's" role in Death of a Salesman to a boy in an all boys school, told him and the rest of the class that that was that, and to start reading the play out loud.
Harry Truman was essentially right. Old Give-em-hell Harry said that boys don't need ladies and failures as teachers, but male role models. The problem is that these male role models need to be after all multicultural, tolerant of gays, and all the rest of that New Model stuff, but social mechanisms make such language almost (but not quite) unusable because it's so precisely unheard.
We survived Pete Dunderdale's gender neutral casting of Death of a Salesman (at St. Viator High School in Arlington Heights, Illinois, in 1966) and we fell under the spell of the great Arthur Miller. The theater in our class worked its ancient rough magic: there was a respite from the constant teasing and bullying in the class, a respite that comes from the compassion that flows in turn from Aristotle's "pity and terror".
Once the "gay" issues are put into proper perspective, students can watch this film as a dialectic between "Hectoring" (learning gobbets for their own sake) and "Ir-winning" (learning test taking strategies) to realize that the two approaches fit together as Yin, and Yang; without Hector's passion for subject matter, or Irwin's gamesmanship, the students won't succeed. Class discussions can focus on questions such as "is there any such thing as useless knowledge?", "is Mr. Hector a bad man, or a man who did a bad thing?", or, in certain Borstals, on "is Mr Hector a ponce or not?"
The foaming at the mouth in Amazon reviews such as the one above, in which the author sets his face against "altruistic posers" (?), is in fact the subject matter of the film. It ain't called "liberal" education for nothing, lads, and if any of you lot have a problem with that, if any of you lot would destroy what's left of the sweetness of life, or the ability to forgive a good man who's done a bad thing, then you don't belong in a "liberal" education, and would do better at the technical Borstal learning a useful trade, such as gun-smithing or horse-shoeing.
I'm quite serious. Bennett's film is an implicit protest against the Thatcherism that was breaking out at the time of the film, and a sociological phenomenon common today, which the ruralization of the cities: the careful structuring of white-collar work so as to admit at least a subset of men and boys whose fathers had industrial work, but who have no serious prospect of ever proving their manhood at a coal face.
At least, not until very recently: British coal faces have been re-opening owing to the price of oil, giving the lie to Thatcher's policies. However, a generation has as a result of the Mad Woman serious problems in being men and is aging without even a holiday the Isle of Man.
It appears that these Yobs, although dressed in the latest City fashions, make it their business to riot at football games, to prove their absent masculinity, and of course they hound queers in a way that the History Boys, in their early 1980s urbanity, a lost urbanity, would find Wilkesian and therefore amusing ("is it joined-up writing, sir?"). Ir-winnism by itself is the forced march these Yobs endure to essentially display the mere shadow educational attainment and it makes nonsense of education, and has made nonsense of their lives.
Bennett, as in The Madness of King George, is Shakespearean because both British playwrights work through the tragic equation to get to a green world of compassion and forgiveness; a world under systematic attack today. Shakespeare found a way out of Renaissance mayhem. King George forgets "America" and realizes what a lucky man he is, especially in comparision to his rotter of a son. The boys forgive Hector's transgression by way of realizing a much larger corruption as does Isabella in Measure for Measure: the fact that the Headmaster is sexually exploiting Fiona, and ruining her in such a way that she will be a sex object and a secretary all her days. And, of course, in Miller, nobody dast blame Willy Loman.
Silence is death. Oh, is this a "gay" saying? Goodness gracious me. The fact remains that sex is only a part of life, that people have the right to sexual identity when they don't harm others, and that what matters in life is pretty much what Mr. Hector says and not what Irwin merely pretends to say: the truth: yup, silence is death although "'tis as easy as lying" (as Hamlet says about playing the recorder to the corrupted Rosencrantz...or perhaps, Guildenstern...oh dear).
Five stars. I'd give it fifty but alas I cannot.
Description of The History Boys
A DELIGHTFULLY WITTY COMEDY ABOUT 8 BOISTEROUS-YET-TALENTED SCHOOLBOYS HOPING TO GAIN ADMITTANCE TO ENGLAND'S MOSTPRESTIGIOUS UNIVERSITIES.Bestsellers in DVD
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