Educating Rita (1983)

Educating Rita is a British film comedy-drama first released in 1983, directed by Lewis Gilbert.  The film stars Michael Caine, Julie Walters, Michael Williams and Maureen Lipman.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


26-year-old Liverpudlian hairdresser Rita has decided to get herself an education and so begins an Open University course in English literature.  Her tutor, Dr Frank Bryant, at first tries to dissuade her, but her enthusiasm wins him over.  Both have personal problems that threaten to overwhelm them.  Rita is married to Denny, an uneducated Neanderthal whose idea of Heaven is a pub that sells eight kinds of beer.  A likely candidate for the missing link between man and ape, Denny believes that women exist for one purpose, procreation, and he therefore resents his wife’s attempts to better herself when she should be busy rearing his children.   Meanwhile, Frank has grown disillusioned with academia and, once a promising poet, he now spends most of his time wallowing in self-pity and alcohol, something which amuses his students but which brings him into conflict with his superiors at the university where he works.  Gradually, under Frank’s influence, Rita is transformed from an enthusiastic devourer of pulp fiction to someone with a natural flair for literary criticism.  But, along the way, she appears to lose her charm and spontaneity.  Frank wonders what he has created – another self-opinionated, pretentious graduate like himself, or someone who has really made a change for the better...

One of the high points of British cinema in the 1980s, Educating Rita is both an uproariously funny romantic comedy and a well-honed satire on the class system and the failings of higher education in contemporary Britain.  The film, an ingenious reworking of Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, was directed by Lewis Gilbert (best known for his Bond movies of the 1970s) and scripted by Willy Russell, who wrote the successful stage play on which it is based.  It won three BAFTAs – Best Film, Best Actor (Michael Caine) and Best Actress (Julie Walters) – and the two lead actors also won Golden Globes for their work on this film, as well as Oscar nominations.  

In what is effectively little more than a two handed play (which Maureen Lipman manages to gatecrash in her own inimitable way), Julie Walters and Michael Caine give outstanding performances and great entertainment value.  Both wring every last drop of comedy from Russell’s screenplay, whilst making their characters and their situation totally believable.  Walters had starred in the original stage production of the play and this was her film debut.  Michael Caine surprised the critics and audiences with his flair for comedy - at the time, he was better known for his straight dramatic roles, usually in tough crime dramas (albeit with a touch of sardonic humour).  This film offers Caine some of his best one-liners, including the legendary: "Life is such a rich and frantic form that I need the drink to help me step delicately through it."

Although today the film appears somewhat caricatured (Walters’s portrayal of a Scouser at first appears to be pure stereotype), Educating Rita continues to have a resonance, particularly through its central message that education can change people for better or worse.  The main protagonist, Rita, is released from her repressive working class background through education and ends up having the power to choose her future, rather than have her fate pre-determined by her social origins.  

The film also shows there could be a downside to education, in that it may be creating a new kind of social stratum that is just as hermetically closed and constrained at that from which Rita has escaped.  The educated middle class consider themselves superior to the unwashed tabloid-reading masses by dint of the fact that they can recite a few lines of Longfellow and know the exact meaning of assonance.  And yet are they any freer?  Is this breed of smug, cappuccino-swigging sodoku addicts  not just as confined by rituals and conventions of another kind, obliged to buy chardonnay and mange tout in Waitrose rather than the stout and fish fingers (three packets for the price of two) in Tesco’s?   Education is a two edged sword – it can liberate and it can ensnare.  The most valuable lesson that Frank teaches Rita is to think for herself, and that should be what education is about, not acquiring a passport to some elitist club.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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