REVIEW - THE ENGLISH TEACHER

Cameron Diaz plays a bad teacher in a bad movie and it gets a major theatrical push. Julianne Moore plays a good teacher in a good movie and it gets dribbled out into release. The English Teacher is its own filmic lesson in how the right cast and the right script can enliven even the most formulaic of concepts, and boy is this film formulaic. If there's some comfort involved in awaiting the inevitable moments wherein each and every box on the list of cliches are individually checked off, here that comfort is peppered with sharp humour, making for a winning comedy. Crucially, the actors play their roles as if in their own personal drama, allowing the humour to shine through in the scenarios and in the dialogue. Characters employed purely for comedic purposes may thus stick out, but such is the level of quality in Dan and Stacy Chariton's screenplay that said characters' purposes are fulfilled entirely, and nudge the film into the comedy genre a little more firmly, ensuring that a number of narrative coincidences can be justified and overlooked. It's that same list of cliches. I do wonder if this film had come out thirty years ago, would there be so many similar films bumping around, aiming for but not quite achieving the degree of comic excellence attained here? Julianne Moore does her usual, which is to significantly improve the material she's working with, although she's been in far worse projects than this. Moore ekes silly out of sensible, and doesn't push it too far, so that no matter how daft things get (they don't get that daft, actually), there's still an element of truthfulness to The English Teacher, and it doesn't descend into a string of skits. Jessica Hecht and Norbert Leo Butz are hilarious as husband and wife principal and vice-principal, and Nathan Lane is the very embodiment of the over-enthusiastic drama teacher who's just too funny to dislike. Lane and the Charitons get the details of his role spot on, and The English Teacher is full of cute details, like the medicine spilling on the floor in the sex scene, Jason's manuscript signed as 'J. B. Sherwood', and a novel use of narration from Fiona Shaw, proving again that no film has ever been made worse by the presence of Fiona Shaw. Not even The Black Dahlia.