Jamie (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a single mother who wakes her child, Malia (Emily Alyn Lind) five minutes before school, feeds her a pop tart and coca cola, and barely brushes her child’s hair. So its no wonder Malia can’t focus
in school but Jamie blames the teacher, who blames the union….
I don’t kow about you, but what does a union or non-union have to do with a teacher failing
in the classroom during school hours, and what does a teacher have to do with a bad parent who doesn’t
have time to help her child with homework? Hmmmm…..hold that thought.
Enter Nona (Viola Davis) a teacher who takes her classroom seriously and also takes her son seriously.
She tutors him at nights in their lovely suburban home. By day she loves her students. She is what
this film hopes to achieve. The Erin Brokovich of Education!
Ordinarily one would leap at a Gyllenhaal film. She’s a brilliant actress all around. But in this, playing a train-wreck of a parent, an empty-barrels-make-the-most-noise mom, especially without a platform to stand on, it’s hard to love her character, Jamie’s cause to build a new school to fix an old problem. Yes, it’s based on a true story, but Jamie seems to think fighting for a new school – because of “Fail Safe Laws” – will solve it all. Apparently Jamie’s daughter doesn’t make the lottery for the better school and her Jamie feels her child is trapped. Has Jamie ever considered just reading to her daughter at bedtime instead of feeding her Snickers bars and videos? Jamie can’t do that because Jamie bartends nights.
A couple of years ago Davis Guggenheim did a brilliant documentary on the lottery system in New York schools entitled Waiting for Superman. But this movie seems to reveal an unlikable mother (Gyllenhaal) who can barely take care of her sloppy apartment let alone a child. Does Jamie’s child really deserve one of the
forty spaces of four hundred at the better school?
The truth is, most teachers are good. They don’t teach for money, they teach out of passion, or so colleague teachers of Viola Davis (played by Rosie Perez and Holly Hunter) believe. The films’ focus shifts to
the idea that if a new school is created, one run by parents and teachers, unions will become irrelevant. The very unions that protect our teachers. Good and bad ones. The truth that is avoided is that in this earnest film about our education systems, is while systems are flawed, its parents who expect these teachers who are buying school supplies out of their own pockets, to fix their child. These “Fail Safe Laws’ for creating new
schools show that most new schools fail after a certain amount of time.
And if we don’t want to finger point at the parent or the teacher, how about just starting at the top… maybe the problem is the Principal. The administration. At least that’s what the real life teacher invited with me to a private screening believed. Two and a half tiaras .