SANDY GARNETT ART BLOG

The History Boys is set in England where language remains supreme and intellect is the meat on the funny bone of this picture.  A small form at a local secondary school achieves high marks and are therefore privy to Cambridge and Oxford applications, a format apart from this country and therefore exotic for those unfamiliar.  I was a little English schoolboy between the ages of 8 and 10 and I maintain that had I stayed on in England I would have maximized my intellectual potential, something I certainly did not do upon returning to the States, even in a decent town with graduating high school classes that routinely rank well with US boarding schools.  At Hill House in London boys came and went with their families and the first question asked was ‘what country are you from?’  And then do you have humor, are you athletic, do you have artistic or language capacities, and are you fun to play with.  The intellect was sharp and fascinating then, perhaps more so than any other experience in school that I recall and so lament.  The History Boys reminds me what bright intellect and the passages of striving academically in adolescence might have been for me had I not been so mired in the thought that at one point in time everyone would accept and like me.  This is a universal story but I maintain that cool in England involved intellect and cool stateside was and remains another animal.

 Hector is a genius character in the film, a general studies professor with scruples who nonetheless inspires his class with a daily regimen of perfectly phrased quotations from literary masters in response to any questions posed.  His free form approach and homoerotic leanings play humorous in contrast to the new instructor on the grounds who will prepare these boys for the test.  And there is the aging graceful History professor, whose razor dialogue makes her more attractive as she pushes the boys to be all they can be, frustrated woman that she is observing a history that does not contain enough women.

 Every trace of this film underscores that even the dullest English thoughts exude intelligence, as if at any turn one might be struck down for a thought which might be perceived as idiotic.  This is what I remember about my few years in London and I miss it for this reason.  The boys are overly written, the dialogue cannot quite represent 17 year olds, but I don’t care.  The form attacks their last term with books and poems and songs and thinking in order to compel Cambridge and Oxford to consider them for acceptance.

I am reminded of the gratuitous Wonder Boys and sweet, drippy Dead Poet’s Society.  Neither movie contains the power of the History Boys, a film to repeatedly view with enjoyment and personal enhancement, barring a bit much of the homosexual undertones that aren’t necessary and come off a bit overly critical of professors, as with the excellent Magdelene Sisters.  That film talked about the laundry services in Ireland, which were running until 1986 I want to say, in which girls who had shamed their families for sometimes benign reasons were placed in a work camp environment subsidized by the Catholic Church.  The former has a great spin and the latter a cautionary one, but there are overriding parallels I draw which convey the unnecessary intensity in both on certain fronts.  Nevertheless, The History Boys is top 10 material and will stretch the brain the way much English work does.  Pity we don’t have more of that Stateside.