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BY
SCOTT VON DOVIAK
November 7, 2003
The inspirational teacher movie has been a tried-and-true staple since at least 1939, when Goodbye, Mr. Chips boosted Kleenex sales nationwide. Since then we've been treated to countless variations on the theme - including The Blackboard Jungle, Dead Poet's Society, and most recently Music of the Heart - none of which have veered too far from the prototype. Now HBO brings us Cheaters, a darkly comic twist on the genre that pulls the cliches of the inspirational teacher movie straight through the looking glass.
Based on true events, Cheaters centers on the 1994 Illinois state finals of the Academic Decathalon, a national high school knowledge bee consisting of subject tests, speeches, essays and interviews. Gerald Plecki, a teacher at run-down Steinmetz High, is reluctantly volunteered by the principal to coach the school's team, even though upscale rival Whitney Young has won nine years in a row and is a shoo-in to do so again. Though the Steinmetz teammates are bright and willing to put in the extra hours of study, they simply can't compete with the resources of the better funded Whitney Young squad. That is, until Steinmetz's Irwin Flickas (Dov Tiefenbach) shows up at the classroom with a stolen stack of the subject tests in hand.
It is at this point that Cheaters
shows what a smart - some would say cynical - little movie it really is.
Does Plecki tear up the test booklets and suspend Flickas from the team? No.
Do the students agonize over whether or not to do the right thing? Hell, no.
Glory is suddenly right at their finger-tips if they're
willing to accept just a little ethical slippage.
Fortunately, Jolie is there to put everything in perspective. The kids at
Whitney Brown, you see, have all the opportunities. And how do kids get into
Whitney Brown? Their parents lie about where they live, they grease the
wheels of the school system, basically they cheat. The Steinmetz kids
wouldn't be cheating if they look at the answers, they'd just be correcting
a flawed system. They are simply leveling
the playing field of an unfair class system. As team leader Jolie Fitch
(Jena Malone) puts it, "this is the ultimate affirmative action."
So Dr. Plecki lets the students decide.
Aside from one foreign exchange student who
has a brief crisis of conscience, they don't even think twice. Of course
they're going to cheat. And thus a dazzling roundelay of hypocrisy and
rationalization is put into motion.
After their upset victory, suspicion immediately falls on the Steinmetz
team, which reacts not with guilt but with outrage. From the team's point of
view, And so the deception continues. Inspired by a scene in
Stand and Deliver, in which barrio
math teacher Jaime Escalante lashes out at accusations of cheating on the
part of his underprivileged students, the Steinmetz team seizes on a
strategy of self-righteous indignation. Even after their wall of secrecy
crumbles and the truth emerges, they still insist they have done nothing
wrong - or at least no more wrong than anyone else has done. Those in a
position of wealth and privilege cheat all the time, they argue. It's just
that the system is set up to prevent them from being caught. They have a
point, of course, but unfortunately it's a point the prevailing power
structure is never going to acknowledge.
This fact is not lost on the teacher/ringleader Plecki, played by Jeff Daniels in a refreshing break from the seemingly endless string of doofuses he has portrayed in recent years. Daniels does a superb job at conveying the warring impulses that drive Plecki, a decent man who has been worn down by a sense of futility over the injustice of a system he can't control. Standouts among the young actors who make up the Steinmetz team include the convincingly weasely Tiefenbach and the seemingly wise beyond her years Malone, who defies all the usual "smartest girl in school" conventions.
Writer/director John Stockwell displays a firm grasp of filmmaking technique, with a particular knack for propelling the story forward through montage. He does occasionally overstep - playing the Rocky theme as ironic counterpoint when the Steinmetz team collects their trophies should have seemed like a good idea for about three seconds and then discarded immediately - but he brings much more audio-visual verve to Cheaters than is seen in the typical direct-to-cable production.
Without giving away too much about the ending, rest assured that the old
"cheat, cheat, never beat" platitudes do not exactly prevail. This is no
Afterschool Special, and it would seem pretty safe to say that the wry
ironies of Cheaters won't be finding a place on the shelves of P.S.
101 anytime soon.
http://www.culturevulture.net/Television/Cheaters.htm
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