“Kung Fu” star David Carradine, the great warrior-philosopher of the 20th century, once said: “If you can’t be the poet, be the poem.” He makes it sound so easy — as though deferring your story to someone else wouldn’t feel like an act of defenestration — but then again, the man seldom met a problem he couldn’t high-kick into submission.
Lisa Spinelli (a captivating Maggie Gyllenhaal) has no such luck. The eponymous, fortysomething educator at the heart of Sara Colangelo’s “The Kindergarten Teacher,” Lisa has spent the last 20 years of her life teaching kids the alphabet and shepherding them to the next stop on the assembly line of America’s school system, and she’s finally beginning to succumb to the banality of it all.
You can see it in her posture as she sits in her classroom at the end of the day, her long body slumped...
Lisa Spinelli (a captivating Maggie Gyllenhaal) has no such luck. The eponymous, fortysomething educator at the heart of Sara Colangelo’s “The Kindergarten Teacher,” Lisa has spent the last 20 years of her life teaching kids the alphabet and shepherding them to the next stop on the assembly line of America’s school system, and she’s finally beginning to succumb to the banality of it all.
You can see it in her posture as she sits in her classroom at the end of the day, her long body slumped...
- 1/27/2018
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
A remake of the Israeli film of the same name, Sara Colangelo’s The Kindergarten Teacher pulls no punches. It leans full-tilt into its disturbing premise: a veteran kindergarten teacher becomes obsessed with a young student who has a gift for poetry. Maggie Gyllenhaal stars as the titular teacher and is the perfect actress for something like this. She plays every moment starkly sincere, ultimately to a fault.
There’s a tonal problem running throughout this picture that’s hard to reconcile. Lisa Spinelli (Gyllenhaal) has been a teacher for twenty years, commuting into the city from Staten Island, where she’s got a husband (Michael Chernus) and two teenage kids. Still determined to be a poet, she takes a night class taught by Gael García Bernal.
Despite her best attempts, Lisa’s poetry is soundly dismissed by teacher and students alike. Cue 5-year old Jimmy Roy (Parker Sevak), a...
There’s a tonal problem running throughout this picture that’s hard to reconcile. Lisa Spinelli (Gyllenhaal) has been a teacher for twenty years, commuting into the city from Staten Island, where she’s got a husband (Michael Chernus) and two teenage kids. Still determined to be a poet, she takes a night class taught by Gael García Bernal.
Despite her best attempts, Lisa’s poetry is soundly dismissed by teacher and students alike. Cue 5-year old Jimmy Roy (Parker Sevak), a...
- 1/25/2018
- by Dan Mecca
- The Film Stage
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