Film Review
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 '60s and '70s including
You Only Live Twice)
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
sophisticated comedy - at the time, he was better known as a 'heavy',
usually in tough crime dramas such as
Get Carter (1971).
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.'
Well, it beats 'You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!',
Caine's famous line from
The Italian Job (1969).
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.
© James Travers 2009
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Lewis Gilbert film:
The Good Die Young (1954)
Film Synopsis
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.