High School Hell

LIFE AT THE fictional JFK High almost matches my real high school. We had shootings, locker searches, and teachers flipping out--but not all on the same morning. Such is the unbelievable pace, however, that colors much of Teachers, the thoroughly confused new release from Arthur Hiller.

Nick Nolte plays a burned-out social studies teacher. He looks like he has been taking eating lessons from Gerard Depardeau, and talks like a graduate from the Wolfman Jack College of Elocution, altogether appearing more fit to push a broom than a pencil. Nolte is supposedly the best teacher at JFK, and that is just the beginning of the school's problems. JFK is so bad that it is being sued by a former student for failing to fail him, and it has hired the best-looking legal help money can buy in the form of JoBeth Williams. Williams is also a grad of JFK who believes the suit will reform the unreformable.

Williams is not well-suited to play the Last of the White Liberal Lawyers; how many attorneys do you know that take depositions in a black leather skirt? There must be a law school somewhere in Hollywood that turns out these good looking and earnest young lawyers ripe for disillusionment.

Implausible as they may be, Nolte and Williams (the Forces of Good) ally against the System, with Judd Hirsch as Evil Force I and Lee Grant as Evil Force 2. Hirsch is anti-typecast as a former idealist corrupted by the System, and it hampers his performance as a villain. Hirsch reeks of integrity, even while trying to lie, cheat, and bluff his away around Williams and Nolte, though the part of head witch suits Grant very nicely.

"As Williams attempts to get the scoop on the inner workings of JFK for the suit, she also tries to get at the inner workings of Nolte. He, on the other hand is too busy with Eddie, his problem student. Ralph Macchio reprises his role from Karate Kid as The Shrimp Who Kicks Ass aka The Tough Kid From a Broken Home Who Is All Right Underneath--Really. Don't wince; the roles, dialogue and intentions of the script are so telegraphed, outlined, highlighted, and underlined that only a Columbia film-student could miss the point.

Teachers seems to be the victim of directorial schizophrenia. Arthur Hiller has made films before, and he knows that MGM wants to make loads of money. Therefore his film possesses all the advertising and proper packaging of Porky's or Meatballs. The heavily promoted soundtrack, a good sign of a bad movie, is from well-established dead armadilloes like Bob Seeger, 38 Special, and ZZ Top.

THE BEGINNING of the film keeps feeding these false expectations. We witness a typical mad Monday at JFK: a kid nearly bleeds to death as he waits for the nurse, a school psychologist flips out, and most of the teachers are in absentia. Nolte, the model teacher, is too busy in bed to be in class, and a lingering topless view of his bedmate puts Teachers on its way to a well-deserved R rating.

As soon as Nolte arrives at school, a huge dose of parental gravity gets overlayed on the cellophane. Hiller and screenwriter W. R. McKinney (an alias if there ever were one) possess Social Consciousness. They want to make a statement about an Important Issue, like those movies about bedwetting and wifebeating that TV does so well. What else but misguided do-gooderism could be behind dialogue like this:

Nolte: "Can't you see--nobody cares--I can't make a difference!"

Williams: 'Yes you can! You must!"

Hiller thinks he can tell us what is wrong with our schools, but all he manages are the great American cliches, "One man can make a difference", "If people just cared more about our schools", etc. This movie follows the Ronald Reagan approach to problem-solving: say something vague and positive, then hope the problem goes away. Placing the administrators as heavies also echoes Reaganite attitudes. You can almost hear him saying "Get the administrators off the teacher's backs, and America's schools will be great again." After seeing this film you know that it was made by Beverly Hills residents who send their children to private schools.

Richard Mulligan is the only glimmer of brightness in the mawkishness. He plays a harmless loony accidentally recruited as an emergency substitute teacher. Mulligan is the only person ever shown as teaching, albeit in the unusual format of dressing up as Lincoln, Washington, and Custer. He is the only actor who invests his part with the gentleness that great teachers possess. But Mulligan's work is wasted. No actor can really shine in a role that is essentially a bad joke. Yes, you guessed it: "You have to be crazy to teach."

Hiller does not manage to synthesize the opposing personalities of this film until the very end, in possibly the worst climax to scar a movie in many years. A teen-exploitation film rarely has trouble finding a good reason for its female leads to take off their clothes, and you might have thought you had seen them all. As Teachers rolls to its much anticipated end, we find that Nolte has finally decided to bag teaching for something more suitable to his talents, like All-Star wrestling. In order to convince him to stay, Williams strips to the buff and runs shouting down the school halls.

Like everything else in this film, it looks as bad as it sounds.