I just saw the feature film from Paramount and Walden Media entitled Won’t Back Down. The film is directed by Daniel Barnz, who also directed Beastly. He co-wrote the screenplay with Brin Hill. The movie stars Viola Davis, Maggie Gyllenhall, Holly Hunter, and Oscar Isaac. The Rotten Tomatoes score was 33 percent as of opening day, Friday, Sept. 28. This means that of 66 professional movie critics, 44 gave it a bad review while 22 gave it a good review.
The consensus opinion, according to Rotten Tomatoes, is “Despite the best efforts of its talented leads, Won’t Back Down fails to lend sufficient dramatic heft or sophistication to the hot-button issue of education reform.”
It’s basically a David-vs.-Goliath story of two single mothers, one a teacher, who come together to save a failing public school from incompetent teachers, uncaring administrators, and an entrenched union. It is an inspiring story that will resonate with many parents, because it makes them feel empowered to do something about their children’s failing schools when those schools set low expectations and fail to teach their sons and daughters to read or perform math skills.
The dramatic performances are stellar, particularly those of Ms Gyllenhall as a mom struggling with a daughter who can’t read because of dyslexia who also recognizes and calls her mom on her own dyslexia, which forced her into low-end jobs, two of them at once, and a father who is nowhere referenced in the movie, and of Ms Davis, who plays a teacher with a son who apparently suffered brain damage because his mom forgot to strap him in a car seat one night during his infancy when she had an accident.
The performance of Mr Isaac as a Teach For America graduate who plays the ukulele is unfortunately diminished by the lack of material. A romantic interest develops between his character and that of Ms Gyllenhall, but romance isn’t really the point of this picture, as evidenced by the Rotten Tomatoes consensus.
No, the point is a political agenda, and it is one-sided in its presentation, narrow in its scope, and shallow in its understanding of the problems facing real schools or the paths to solving those problems. It’s as if the 400-page proposal to open a new school were written by someone who makes flyers for a used-car lot. Actually, that is what happens, and Ms Davis’s character announces that the flyers hit the mark perfectly. This is just silly—empowering, inspiring, yes, but in the end, just silly.
If I were writing about religion, I would say the problems of our schools require meditation, prayer, and guidance, not bumper-sticker slogans. Ms Hunter’s performance as a union president is also played out of context by the material. She expresses backing for the “people power” behind the efforts to change the schools, but the screenplay has her standing with the union at a final board hearing about the new school being proposed by the parent group. Her endgame, which has her quitting her job in the union to do, “What else? Teach,” is unsatisfying.
One pernicious quality about this movie, though, is its ability to motivate people who have only about half the information they need to be effective. Most schools opened through “parent trigger laws” are opened by billionaires. What happens in the film is technically possible under the law in California, but many of the stereotypes presented don’t reflect the state of most of our schools. Yes, we have some bad teachers out there, as well as some uncaring administrators, entrenched unions, and feeble bureaucrats. But we also have true believers in our teachers and our children. But charter schools are not the answer, unions aren’t the enemy of our children, and parents would better serve their children’s education by collaborating with the schools, not causing divisions among them.
Now, this could have been a better movie, I think, if the romantic interest were played out. We get a few seconds of some pretty good chemistry between Ms Gyllenhall’s dyslexic daughter, played by Emily Alyn Lind, and Mr Isaac’s character. He makes up a little song and sings to her. The moment is wasted, however, giving more screen time to the political message, and that is a real shame. We could have had a very nice story, and instead, we pay $9 to watch an editorial! Aye aye aye!
Other writers didn’t buy the easy-fix approach put forth in Won’t Back Down, as shown in this editorial on Salon.com. The writer suggests checking out another movie, one released this fall to much less fanfare, entitled Brooklyn Castle, which “chronicles a messy reality—that of Intermediate School 318, a Brooklyn middle school where 70 percent of the kids live below the poverty line, and where funding cuts are threatening the after-school activities that are key to getting many of them engaged. That includes the school’s chess team, which is, improbably, among the best in the country.”