Video Review |
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Video Review |
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Last Updated 01/24/01
Email: robitai@our-town.com
Educating Rita
While most of the world's involved in Christmas shopping and Yuletide joy, folks with
associations to academia are in the throes of final exams.
Those high stress, low gratification grand finales to the academic experience often
bring out the worst in people. Students agonize over having to take exams; professors
agonize over grading them. Fortunately, an education involves much more than mere test
taking. Cultivation of the intellect is a
heady endeavor. If you don't know what it's
like to participate in the process, or if you don't remember, take a look at
"Educating Rita."
This 1983 classic stars Michael Caine as Dr. Frank Bryant, a slightly off-center, cynical
professor of British Literature who draws as much inspiration from a bottle of gin as he
does from Shakespeare. This may well be one
of Caine's best roles. He's reaches deep to
depict this role with sensibility and flair. Bryant's
a complicated man with a history littered with bad relationships and sad circumstances.
Then Rita knocks on this office door.
Julie Walters (most recently appearing in "Billy Elliott") plays Rita
with an accomplished edginess that makes her hard, lively, and likeable. Rita's from a working-class environment where
the men like their women barefoot and pregnant. Rita wants an education, not a baby. She enrolls in Dr. Bryant's open university
literature class, which is designed to reach non-traditional students.
This is the British
system, so Dr. Bryant's faced with the prospect of weekly tutorial sessions with Rita. She's frankly honest and deliberate in her
approach to academics. She questions everything, including her own ability. Arriving on the
scene with her first essay in hand, she announces that it's "crap," and she
wants to know how to do it right. She leaves
Dr. Bryant no room at all to patronize her.
Although the movie opens as though it might lapse into typical Hollywood formula
romance, it never goes in that obvious direction. Instead,
Rita's experiences transform her into an "educated" version of herself. By the end of her journey she can quote Blake with
the best of them and hold her own in any situation. In many ways, she teaches Dr.Bryant
far more than he ever teaches her.
Various and unexpected
turns of plot will keep you interested. The
superior acting remains consistently sustained as Rita and Dr. Bryant evolve to find their
destinies.
Fortunately,
they both pass the test, and the movie gets an "A."