Bad Education (2019)

REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER

Do try BAD EDUCATION (2019), starring Hugh Jackman and Alison Janney, which has just surfaced on Sky Cinema. 

It’s a bad title for a good film. In the UK, the title evokes the weak tea comedy of the Jack Whitehall sitcom and its spin-off movie; in the US, it aligns it with such films as BAD TEACHER or the BAD MOMS franchise. It is neither of those things, but it is a reminder that cinema marketeers no longer know how to sell or even describe a movie if it doesn’t slot into a genre, in other words if it falls simply into the category of “drama”.

BAD EDUCATION tells the story of a senior superintendent teacher of the Roslyn School district in Long Island, who, together with his asssistant super, work to move their school from the number four position in the country to number one.

Except all is not what it seems. I don’t want to give spoilers because many in the UK do not know of the true story on which it is based, but it was enjoyable to watch without knowing anything about the case, to be pulled along slowly with a mounting sense of incredulity.

Hugh Jackman gives a career best as Dr Frank Tassone, playing the ambiguity of his character with pitch perfect precision. It won’t mean anything to you if you haven’t seen it yet but it means the world to me that he gets the boy to say “accelerated.”

Alison Janney is so good it’s easy to take her for granted, but let us not do that. She’s as much a reason for watching it as Jackman.

Watch out for the sandwich eating scene they have together. He’s trying not to eat carbs. She offers him some of her pastrami-on-rye. Everything about their relationship is right there.

Great support from Ray Romano (a terrific character actor in recent productions, THE BIG SICK and THE IRISHMAN), Alex Wolff and Geraldine Viswanathan.

Produced by HBO and not released in UK cinemas because of the pandemic, but released in the US on the new HBO Max.