Film: The History Boys (1/3)

This is a film made of an Alan Bennett play that Nicholas Hytner, the artistic director of the Royal National Theatre since 2003 (succeeding Sirs Trevor Nunn, Richard Eyre, Peter Hall and Olivier), originally directed for that stage (as was The Madness of King George), which went on to be much lauded on Broadway, so I was curious to see what all the fuss was about. Films of plays are often problematic, and I suppose the main motivation for making them usually is just to give a larger audience access to the work. Chris Doyle (cinematographer extraordinaire for Wong Kar-Wai and many other, mostly Asian, directors you can review at imdb, see link below) was visiting the Film Center last year and argued that whatever makes a good film, it is not the script, and defended this notion by rhetorically asking if there has ever been a good film made of a Shakespeare play (a subject I will leave for further consideration).

One of the problems is that we accept the theater as an artificial stylized construct where people are going to speak in a more formal literary manner, and that always seems so odd and flat in a naturalistic film context, though clearly not so much in older black and white studio films that lean more towards the stylized character of theater. I can imagine that this play would have been more effective in the theater because the cinematic flatness diminishes the emotional impact. Even though on the one hand you have the realism of cinema contrasting with the artifice of theater—i.e., film can suggest that it is portraying a reality that just happened to be documented on celluloid, while theater takes place in the blatantly artificial context of the stage—in a way, theater can have such a more real sense in terms of emotional impact, because the character appears before you in flesh and blood, even as much as you know you are watching an actor, it is an actual human being standing there having the experience. Also a quick scan of the blurbs on metacritic revealed, courtesy of Rolling Stone, that nearly an hour was cut in the transition from stage to screen, which further explains why it felt a little thin and a little shy of all the fuss.

That said, it is very intelligently written, with interesting issues raised about education, history, poetry, etc. (ooh, Hector would scold me for throwing in that "etc."—inside joke you will get if you see the film) and beautifully performed by the original London/Broadway cast. Needless to say, it is the type of production I would no doubt take much nostalgic pleasure in from my London theatergoing days and I was delightfully entertained, though now I am curious to read the play, because I still want to know what all the fuss was about. In short: I laughed; I cried (I know, I am such a big baby). I can not really wholeheartedly praise the film as a cinematic endeavor, and it was a letdown as a document of a play since a third of it was cut, but I have a soft spot for it nonetheless. If literary English theater is your cup of tea, and you are the type of person who, like I, would find witticisms regarding the subjunctive tense exceedingly droll, by all means rent the DVD when it comes out for a couple hours passing amusement and reflection.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0236313/ (Ooh look, Chris Doyle is a Taurus--YESSSSSSSS!)

http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/historyboys (what the professionals had to say)