DEAD POETS SOCIETY - DVD review

"Carpe Diem."

Seize the carp.

I may be the only viewer on Earth who was never moved by "Dead Poets Society." Well, OK, several other DVD Town staff members have mentioned they didn't like it, either, so I guess I'm not the only one. Also, I've been told there are millions of people living in parts of the world where movies and television aren't even available, who have never seen the film. I've never met any of these folks.

In my case, it's not just that I think the movie is old hat, based on the well-worn premise of a revered teacher and his adoring students, but that after almost forty years of teaching high school, I've gotten tired of the oversimplifications such movies present. Yes, we all know well-loved teachers; yes, we all know teachers who have made a positive difference in the lives of their students. Yes, we'd all love to have had Robin Williams as our high school English teacher. And, yes, we all know the movie was a smash hit and is dearly admired by a legion of fans. But, really, "Dead Poets Society" lays it on so thick, it's hard to believe in any of it.

Directed by Peter Weir ("Picnic at Hanging Rock," "Gallipoli," "The Year of Living Dangerously") and written by Tom Shulman (who was inspired by one of his own teachers), "Dead Poets Society" tries to be heartwarming, uplifting, and inspirational. But for me it was just more of the same. It's been done before, many times, and better in movies like "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," "To Sir, With Love," "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," "Mr. Holland's Opus," even television's "Welcome Back, Kotter." The fact is, "Dead Poets Society" adds little to the genre that hasn't been said before and aims, instead, at familiar stereotypes and overly obvious tugs at the heartstrings.

Robin Williams plays a prep-school English teacher named John Keating. Any resemblance between his name and the name of the famous English poet John Keats is purely intentional. Keating goes to teach at an elite boys' boarding school on the Atlantic coast, the Welton Academy, in 1959; any resemblance between this school and John Knowles's Devon School or J.D. Salinger's Pencey Prep is purely intentional. Yet the big difference is that the plot of "Dead Poet Society" centers as much on the teacher as on the students. Not unlike Knowles's "Peace Breaks Out." If you think you've heard this story before, you have. More often than you think.

Williams is sweet and charming in the role, but he's still Robin Williams beneath it all. It's only a small step from the manic Adrian Cronauer in 1987's "Good Morning, Vietnam" to the impassioned John Keating in 1989's "Dead Poets Society." Williams appears to be improvising much of the time, as is his custom, and he seems determined to want us to love him. The movie even follows the same basic outline as "Good Morning, Vietnam," with Williams playing the nonconformist who soon gets into trouble with his straightlaced superiors. The question I had from the beginning was why such a staid, rigid, traditional institution as Welton would hire Keating in the first place. We're told that Keating graduated from the school with honors and that he came highly recommended. But then you look at the other teachers at Welton: all white, middle-aged, sedate, solemn. And you look at Keating, and he's pure Robin Williams. Couldn't the administration, particularly Mr. Nolan (Norman Lloyd), the strict headmaster, sense that this guy might be inclined to bend the rules? I mean, Keating whistles Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture," for crying out loud.

Anyway, Keating is an unorthodox English teacher, to say the least. He's part educator and part entertainer, something we know every teacher has to be but not to this extent. Keating is pure Robin Williams, entertainer extraordinaire. He takes his class out to the main lobby and makes them look carefully at photographs of the school's bygone heroes, the young men of another age, full of hopes and dreams, who, he tells them, now have only one thing in common--they're all dead. Then he has them lean into the photos and listen, oh, so carefully, as he whispers behind them, "Carpe diem, carpe diem...seize the day."

Keating is a showman; he mesmerizes his students. He stands on his desk to lecture; he has his students tear out the idiotic introduction to their ancient poetry anthologies; he tells them there will be no coldhearted, calculated interpretations of literature in his class. He wants them to be passionate; he attempts to instill in them not only a love of literature but a love of free thought; he encourages them to be different, to think differently, to think for themselves rather than be conformists.

Needless to say, the school administration takes a dim view of such enthusiasm. They would prefer that Keating teach as all the rest of the staff teach--by rote, by memorization, by the book. OK, so what we've got in Keating is basically the perfect teacher and one who must be squashed. The machine cannot allow a misshapen cog to continue spinning for long.

While Keating is encouraging his students to think outside the box, one of them discovers Keating's dusty old poetry book, one he used when he was student at Welton, with an inscription referring to a mysterious "Dead Poets Society." Apparently, when Keating was in school, he and a small group of friends formed a secret club that would read poetry together in a cave near campus and follow Thoreau's admonition to "live deep and suck out all the marrow of life...to learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Why a group of teenage boys would get so instantly excited about reading poetry in the dead of night in a cold, damp cave is anybody's guess. I suppose kids in 1959 were more adventurous, more romantic, and more intellectual than kids today. Of course, I was in high school in 1959, and I met no such people, but maybe I'm just different.

Granted, Keating is a wonderful teacher--smart, kind, dedicated, clever, innovative, understanding, and generally too good to be true. "How can you stand being here?" asks one of his students, Neil Perry. "Because I love teaching," responds Keating. "I don't want to be anywhere else." Yet in his well-meaning sincerity, he sets some of his impressionable young students off on collision courses, and he even advises one of them to try to reason with a demanding parent (Kurtwood Smith), to disastrous effect.

The young actors are more convincing in their roles than many such people we see in the movies--Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, Josh Charles, Gale Hansen, Dylan Kussman--and they're ably supported by consummate pros Kurtwood Smith and Norman Lloyd. But none of them can compete with a screenplay that luxuriates in clichés and ends in a melodramatic incident meant purely to manipulate our emotions.

However, while almost nothing in the last half of "Dead Poets Society" rings true, it's all so sincerely presented that most viewers will gladly suspend their disbelief and go along with it; not a few will even shed a tear. If it works for you, go for it.

Video:
Most everything about the picture quality is good news. The Buena Vista video engineers maintain most the film's 1.85:1 theatrical-release dimensions to easily fill out a 16x9 widescreen TV, and they use a relatively high bit rate in the transfer to maintain most of the film's burnished gold colors. On the minus side, there is a small bit of grain present, a slight softness to the image, and a somewhat dark tone at times, making faces appear a bit too pink. Yet some outdoor scenes come off as clean and clear as high definition. Go figure.

Audio:
The English and French soundtracks are rendered via Dolby Digital 5.1, but although they work well in serving the movie, they are hardly the most impressive things to show off an audio system. Since most of the movie is dialogue driven, it doesn't make a lot of difference that the front stereo spread is only average or that the rear channels are used hardly at all. There is little need for deep bass, but the high end comes off with sparkle, and the midrange is natural and well balanced. This is a soundtrack that serves the needs of the script, not a home-theater system.

Extras:
As this is a special edition, BV have provided more than the mere chapter search they included on their first DVD issue. First up is an impressive audio commentary by director Peter Weir, cinematographer John Seale, and writer Tom Schulman. In it, the director is far more thoughtful and insightful than we generally hear from a filmmaker. This is not another "Well, here are the opening credits" sort of commentary but one that honestly tries to go beneath the surface of things. Next is a newly made, twenty-six-minute retrospective, "Dead Poets: A Look Back," which includes reminiscences, mostly about director Weir, from many of the actors who played the boys in the movie, plus actors Norman Lloyd and Kurtwood Smith. Oddly, it does not include Robin Williams. Then, there is a four-minute sequence of "Raw Takes," unedited clips deleted from the final picture; and two featurettes, "Master of Sound: Alan Splet," eleven minutes, and "Cinematography Master Class," a fourteen-minute excerpt with John Seale, produced for the Australian Television and Radio School.

The extras wrap up with ten scene selections, a paltry number for so popular a film; a chapter insert; a fullscreen theatrical trailer; Sneak Peeks at two other titles from Buena Vista, "Flightplan" and "Annapolis"; English and French spoken languages; and English captions for the hearing impaired.

Parting Shots:
One must give director Weir, screenwriter Shulman, and star Robin Williams credit for their earnestness in trying to produce a meaningful, elevating motion picture, and the degree to which they succeed can only be measured by an audience's willingness to accept a certain amount of hokum in the process. Most viewers over the years have seemed perfectly inclined to go along with the overstatement and sentimentality. I could only handle it for the first few minutes of the show; then, it got to be a long, drawn-out affair reiterating the same points for an unnecessarily long time, ending in an overemotional outburst.

Yeah, I know: Carp, carp, carp goes the critic for diems at a time. So be it.