There is one scene near the end of the new HBO film, Bad Education, that has stuck with me. (Spoiler warning.)
Our protagonist, Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman), is at a gay club with former student and now illicit paramour, Kyle Contreras.
Kyle clearly loves dancing (earlier in the film he even says he used to dance professionally; now, he is a bartender) but Frank is hesitant. The song is melancholic: upbeat but just a little somber. But Frank slowly starts to loosen up and enjoy the dance.
This is not only emblematic of the themes of the film, but it is both the clearest and subtlest illustration of them–Frank’s eyes on the dance floor are filled with profound sadness. He could have been anything (this is America after all), but he chose to be a lie.
Bad Education is the second film from director Cory Finley, debuting at the Toronto International Film festival in September of 2019 where it was picked up by HBO. The film tells the story of a real-life school district superintendent in an affluent Long Island town just outside of New York City who ended up going to prison for embezzling over $10 million.
The film is an interesting, imperfect exploration of the American Dream. It shows what lengths people who feel outside of the system, like Frank, a closeted gay man, will go to, to buy into the Dream. Further, the film shows how self-loathing and fraud accelerate this.
Despite the fact that the film touches on these fairly complex themes, the script has a lack of specificity and tension that leaves a lot of meaning on the table. There is a delicateness to the script that appears to be reaching for subtlety but really is just a lack of depth.
First, it is revealed that Frank’s deputy, Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney), has embezzled $200 thousand. Through the work of a student reporter named Rachel, she slowly uncovers that Gluckin has embezzled over a million dollars over the years, and that Frank has embezzled a vast $10 million.
The slow drip of information leading us to understand just how deep Frank is into this is incomplete. We watch Rachel uncover information, but there’s something intangible about the way it’s presented to the audience.
It’s clear that Frank has committed fraud, but there’s always this feeling that there is some nugget of truth and specificity just outside of the film’s grasp. The ball always hits the rim but never goes through the hoop.
The film doesn’t tie Frank’s embezzlement into his self-loathing properly; it’s not enough to say, “he is ashamed of being gay and not wealthy, so he stole millions of dollars to project success.” Why doesn’t the film properly interrogate Frank? What is the point of view of the film? Why did he embezzle?
Bad Education does not know how it wants us to feel about Frank’s crimes. When we see footage of the wealthy families of the students, they are bordering on cartoonish caricatures, but nothing else in the film indicates that this is a satire of the bourgeoisie.
A film does not have to spoon feed its meaning to the audience, but the viewer never gets the feeling that Bad Education knows what message it would spoon feed if it wanted to. The answers to the questions of who Frank Tassone is and why he committed fraud are not subtle, but hollow.
The structure of the film is lacking as well. Pam and Rachel are both major characters until their narrative function has been served, and then they are dispatched from the film until it is time for an obligatory third act wrap-up scene for each of them. They don’t feel like people but cogs in a narrative.
Most strangely, the article that reveals Frank’s embezzlement is published about 30 minutes before the film is over. It’s like no one ever stopped to ask if this scene was interesting or if it just feels like a scene that should be there, like these aforementioned obligatory Pam and Rachel story closers. Almost none of those closing scenes need to be there.
I’m reminded of one of Billy Wilder’s tenets of screenwriting: “The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then — that’s it. Don’t hang around.” Bad Education far outlasts its welcome.
By the time we got to the scene of Frank dancing at the club, I couldn’t help but think about the 1990 masterpiece Paris Is Burning, a documentary about the drag ball scene in Harlem. The film is also about the exclusion of LGBT people from the American Dream, specifically queer people of color.
Frank, in Bad Education, is gay, but he’s white, which gives him enough cache to buy into the American Dream, but the ball kids do not have that same opportunity.
The half-dozen or so main players in Burning show how they do drag because there isn’t any other way for them to feel wealth, glamour, and entitlement. They have no choice but to be themselves and to find their own ways of expressing themselves because they are so far removed from the mainstream.
Frank, on the other hand, represses who he really is so he can fit into the upper-class society. He saw a path to get there, and he grasped it.
The scene at the club at the end shows us how deeply he has stifled his true self and it suggests that maybe, if he had lived honestly, he could have had a nice life as a gay man. He could have had it all.
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