CINEMA: Andrew Worsdale
IN 1982 Michelle Pfeiffer was the Pink Lady of Rydell High in Grease II and captured sap Maxwell Caulfield’s heart. Fourteen years later she returns to school in Dangerous Minds as LouAnne Johnson, a Waspy, liberal teacher and ex-Marine, who descends on an inner-city school and inspires the kind of delinquent youths who’ve been gracing screens ever since The Blackboard Jungle. That 1950s opus had Rock Around the Clock as its youth “pulsometer”, and Dangerous Minds has Coolio’s hit single Gangsta’s Paradise.
The level of urban violence has spiralled since the days of Bill Haley and Glenn Ford, but the story is the same tired, white-bread formula. Johnson teaches the kids Bob Dylan in an effort to get them to engage with poetry, then turns to Dylan Thomas and bribes them with fairground trips and other prizes if they can find the similarities between the two Dylans. In Ramon Menendez’s far superior Stand and Deliver, at least Edward James Olmos’s teacher inspired his students with complex
Pfeiffer is still great to look at and delivers a very accomplished performance, though at times bordering on the fussy. The teenagers, mainly non-professionals, are all great, but — and here’s the rub — there’s not enough drama from them.
Insufficient tension or plot or violence is generated between them or in their home environments for us to get involved as an audience. The major source of excitement comes from wondering whether Johnson is going to stay or give up in frustration. So what?
Canadian director John N Smith, whose TV film The Boys of St Vincent was a savage indictment of child abuse at an orphanage, toes a much safer line in his first Hollywood effort, which producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer intended as a “small, sensitive picture”. It confounded all expectations by grossing over $80-million in the US. And word has it that, at advance previews in Johannesburg last weekend, the audience cheered when the movie weighed in with that feel-good factor.
Based on the book My Posse Don’t Do Homework by the real-life Johnson, the film does have some valuable things to say about how education can be exciting for ghetto kids, but in my book that don’t add up to a movie. I thought it was cloying, dated, wimpish, liberal, self-righteous and utterly simplistic. So there!