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Adaptations from the stage to the screen are rarely better than the original, and they’re almost never seamless transformations, but The History Boys is a suitable conversion. That’s especially true if you missed your chance to spend $100 a ticket during its limited Broadway run, since the original cast and playwright have come along for the ride.
In early ‘80s Britain, a group of senior boys have achieved the best grades in their school’s history and have become candidates for Oxford and Cambridge. Not accustomed to such prestige, the headmaster of the Yorkshire school hires a young Oxford grad as a tutor, Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), to give them an extra edge. But trusted teachers Hector (Richard Griffiths) and Mrs. Lintott (Frances de la Tour) hesitate to trust this new font of education for their beloved boys, who begin to obsess more over having a competitive advantage in their university exams than an articulate mastery of knowledge.
The question of education’s value is omnipresent here. Who is the better role model – Irwin, a nihilist who sees intellect as ingenuity, and who silently lusts after one of the star pupils, Dakin (Dominic Cooper), or Hector, nearing retirement, who views knowledge as something to share, but gropes his students on a regular basis? Of course, the answer is that neither is better. It’s the variety and the push and pull of both sensibilities that allows the boys to refine their outlooks and elect one, the other, or a personal combination of both.
Most people will tell you that it’s important to have a university education to get by in the world, and that the more you think for yourself and the less you let others tell you how to, the happier and more well rounded you will be. So, sexual issues aside, it’s not a very complicated movie, and its view of education is not that controversial. The audience interest is focused largely on the students’ personal evolutions. The cast is too large to give more than 10 minutes of screen time to each boy’s problems. Openly gay Posner (Samuel Barnett) also pines for the pompous heartthrob Dakin, who knows how to work his charms as well as his looks. They are the most interesting of the lot. Posner even goes so far as to sing “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” to Dakin in front of the other boys afterschool. The younger characters resonate more than all the painfully obvious partitioning of Britain’s educational system, although their casual and knowing conversations about sexuality and Hector’s unsolicited advances feel unrealistic.
The direction and cinematography are a bit awkward, giving off the feeling that you truly are watching a stage production that’s
been brought out of the theater and filmed on location. There are too many panoramic shots of the boys that may have been
exquisitely poised for the stage but don’t work the same way on film. The headmaster, played by Clive Merrison, emits the essence of
broad staginess so unbelievably that there’s nothing I could say that could express how bombastic, farcical, and out of place his character seems. But the rest of the cast – from the boys (Barnett and Cooper in particular) to the teachers (including the deliriously lovely Frances de la Tour as Mrs. Lintott) – make a successful and enjoyable transition to the big screen in an all-around light and sentimental movie.
Zachary Jones
November 17, 2006
