The History Boys
Here's something you never see in American movies: a throng of high school kids standing around a bulletin board, waiting to find out whether they've placed into a rigorous college prep class for their last year. In "The History Boys," when the results are posted, eight of them explode like the contents of a shaken can of soda: They're in. The movie, a shrewdly acted, bittersweet comedy, is just as exuberant.
Set in 1983 at a boys academy in Yorkshire, the film, which Alan Bennett adapted from his Tony-winning play, follows this octet of young Englishmen as they train for scholarship exams into Cambridge and Oxford. These solidly middle-class kids are about to embark on the same sort of developmental journey their American counterparts do in inferior movies like "Fame" and "Dead Poets Society," only the curriculum contains more Auden and no Debbie Allen. There is, however, some singing and dancing, and one smashing same-sex performance of a scene from "Brief Encounter." (The movie -- and the play -- would rate high on the Kinsey scale.)
The man encouraging these and other flights of entertainment is Hector (Richard Griffiths), a lovable fellow whose jolliness exceeds his girth. He teaches them the arts, and in exchange they take turns hopping onto the back of his motorbike and permitting him to feel them up at a stoplight on the ride home.
For the students, it's not so much a violation as it is a rite of passage, one that the most sensitive member of the group, Posner (Samuel Barnett), hasn't been invited to experience. His obvious homosexuality holds no mystery for Hector, whose transgressions get him into trouble later. Regardless, Hector is the most important teacher the boys have; his goal is to make them as well - rounded as he is.
Yet according to Armstrong (Clive Merrison), the school's priggish headmaster, these boys need "polish," "edge," and "flair." Neither Hector's passion-based approach to the classics nor the severity of the school's history teacher, Mrs. Lintott (Frances de la Tour), is enough. Armstrong imports Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), whose Oxford-approved academic credentials, the headmaster thinks, will improve the students' odds of acing the exams.
Irwin is a rigid, boyish, nearly humorless recent graduate, who's only vaguely older than his new charges. Needless to say they don't warm to his approach -- he's basically just teaching them how to dazzle the entrance committees. For Irwin, cultivating original thought is a strategy for success. The boys recognize that this is useful but terribly calculated.
Hector, by contrast, is a romantic and no self-respecting romantic can really support these examinations. He just wants to fill the boys' heads with culture and encourage them to integrate their knowledge uniquely but organically. The teachers are at philosophical odds but not dissimilar in their sexual weakness for the students. Each man has a major intellectual blind spot: himself.
The boys are being coached for a kind of narrow excellence -- taught to think to pass a test, not to live in the world. They know they're being groomed, and Bennett vibrantly captures their sometimes-caustic awareness that education, as much as they've been trained to crave it, might lack practical, real-world value.
No one comes to understand this better than Posner, who harbors a scarcely concealed crush on Dakin (Dominic Cooper), a cad who, from his preened crest of black hair to his insinuating saunter, doesn't merely grasp his sexiness. He wields it. Posner's unrequited affection hurts all the more since it appears that meretricious Dakin is trying to seduce Irwin as a matter of narcissistic amusement.
"The pain," Posner sighs to Scripps (Jamie Parker), a classmate who's considering the priesthood, and to whom Posner and Dakin make their confessions. "Hector would say it's the only education worth having," Scripps tells Posner. "I just wish there were marks for it," he responds.
This is achingly perceptive writing that director Nicholas Hytner, working with the same superb cast that performed in London and on Broadway, brings to life. The classroom settings rarely feel stage-bound. Rather, they swell with the theater of actorly harmony. The Smiths and New Order on the soundtrack merely intensifies the social crackle.
As a playwright, Bennett is exceedingly good at dramatizing the disjunction between the life of the mind and the ways of the world, how what we've learned and how we feel often have nothing in common. A college entrance exam is easy to overcome, he says. Human nature is a lot harder.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
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