Teachers in film: Never too cool for school

A person accepts a temporary teaching position in a school in a tough neighbourhood filled with sullen, rebellious teenagers. The students give the teacher a harrowing time, who reciprocates with innovative methods and understanding, breaking through their resentment and disadvantages, turning them into bright, sparkling diamonds.

If you recognise this as the plot of To Sir, With Love (1967), or Dangerous Minds (1995), or Hichki (2018), you get an A++ and a golden star. To Sir, With Love, based on E.R. Braithwaite’s 1959 autobiographical novel, features Sidney Poitier as the engineer from British Guyana, who takes up a teaching job at an East End Secondary School after an unsuccessful 18-month job hunt. Braithwaite apparently loathed the film and Poitier’s character has come in for some flak for the Magical Negro trope, but the British film has always been popular for its predictable sentimentality.

Dangerous paradise

The awfully contrived Dangerous Minds is best remembered for Michelle Pfeiffer as retired U.S. Marine LouAnne Johnson turning up to teach in a leather jacket and Coolio’s Grammy-award winning ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’. Based on Johnson’s autobiography, My Posse Don’t Do Homework, Dangerous Minds was stuffed with too many stereotypes, and talked to a mainly white audience, to be an effective thesis on education, race or privilege. It was rescued in part by Pfeiffer’s all-in performance.

Rani Mukherjee as Naina Mathur in Hichki again gets a tough teaching assignment after a fruitless job hunt. Like Poitier’s character who takes his students out of the class on field trips and Johnson who teaches literature through Bob Dylan songs (unfortunately not rap), Naina uses examples from real life to illustrate scientific principles.

Carpe Diem

Everyone remembers Robin Williams as the eccentric English teacher, John Keating, in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989). Set in 1959, in an elite boys’ boarding school in Vermont, Dead Poets Society tells the story of the newly joined Keating showing the boys it is alright to follow their hearts, seize the day and make their lives extraordinary. Ethan Hawke, incidentally, plays one of Keating’s students, Todd Anderson.

Shah Rukh Khan, with designer glasses, soft sweaters, and a violin was Keating’s counterpart in Aditya Chopra’s 2000 film, Mohabbatein. Amitabh Bachchan, as the stern headmaster, was the counterfoil to King Khan in this saccharine sweet movie abounding in plastic love stories. 

Laugh a little

There are times when teachers provide comic relief. Boman Irani as Asthana in Rajkumar Hirani’s Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. (2003) and Irani again as Viru Sahastrabuddhe in Hirani’s 2009 blockbuster, 3 Idiots, got quite a lot of laughs as did Archana Puran Singh as Ms. Braganza in Karan Johar’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998).

Back in the day there was Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s charming Chupke Chupke (1975) where Big B, an English professor, changes places with a botany professor, Parimal Tripathi, played by Dharmendra resulting in the famous karela/corolla mix-up. Gulzar’s Parichay (1972), finds Jeetendra hired to teach the grandchildren of a strict colonel, played by Pran. The film, inspired by The Sound of Music, featured a killer sound track by R.D. Burman (‘Musafir hoon Yaaron’ among others).

Some teachers use kindness and understanding to bring out the best in their wards like Aamir Khan in Taare Zameen Par (2007), and others who use tough love for the good of their students. Amitabh Bachchan in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2005 film, Black, is one such. His character, Debraj Sahai, uses harsh and unconventional methods to mould Michelle McNally (Rani Mukerji) into a better person.

There is also the terrifying J.K. Simmons goading and manipulating the young jazz drummer played by Miles Teller in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash (2014). And what about the horrid teacher who scoffs at Pink’s poems in Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd – The Wall (1982)? Who can blame the children for falling into the meat grinder of the education system with such teachers?

Hollywood films have a preponderance of English teachers dispensing life lessons. Brendan Fraser’s Oscar-nominated turn as the morbidly obese Charlie in The Whale being the most recent example. In Gus Van Sant’s Finding Forrester (2000), Sean Connery’s Salinger-ish author, William Forrester, while not being a teacher in the formal sense, does help a Black teenager played by Rob Brown hone his talent.

Connery, incidentally, played a professor of Medieval Literature in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) while his archaeologist-professor son, played by Harrison Ford was happier fighting Nazis than dealing with pretty co-eds who wrote naughty messages on their eyelids.

In Hindi films, apart from music, it is mainly the sciences with the rockstar teachers, the latest in the line being Hrithik Roshan in Vikas Bahl’s Super 30 (2019). There is no place for humanities in the present climate, even though one would not mind being in a classroom where Hrithik is holding forth on complex mathematics.

Whether exhorting one to be honest — as Charlie does to his students online, learning from Walt Whitman, or figuring out the chemistry of cooking, whether it is a story of the teacher or the students, in a classroom, a piano recital or a sports field ( Chak De! India anyone?), a coming together of the teacher and the taught guarantees heart-breaking drama, with a dash of humour and adventure.