School Story Repeats Lessons Often Learned

It doesn't matter if we're watching a scratchy old videotape of "To Sir, With Love," the 1967 Sidney Poitier movie, or "Freedom Writers," the latest back-to-school drama, the question on the chalkboard is always the same: When will the students ditch their attitude and love the teacher -- the one trying so hard to reach them?

Why do we keep falling for movies as cut and dried as these? How do we explain our perennial support for school-based films such as "Lean on Me," "Finding Forrester," "Mr. Holland's Opus" and "Dangerous Minds"? Perhaps it's because the perennial audiences for these films have all-too-recent memories of lunchboxes and lockers. And because these films reinforce our need to see teachers as sensitive heroes, rather than the dweebs, control freaks or buffoons we remember handing us back those flunked papers. We're suckers for meaningful mentor relationships.

So, is it a good thing or bad that "Freedom Writers," which stars Hilary Swank, adheres so closely to the cliched syllabus? Do we call this an invigorating reaffirmation of the things that work so well in these films or the unimaginative reiteration of same? At any given moment, both are true. By the simple force of her acting, Swank (as real-life English teacher Erin Gruwell) is compelling as she faces the apparently insurmountable hostility of her Long Beach, Calif., high school students -- most of them blacks, Latinos and Asians -- who have been deemed unteachable because of their housing project backgrounds, low scores and gang affiliations.

But Erin's strategic little victories at Wilson High follow excruciatingly familiar patterns, ringing of the trite business we associate with "Fame" and other hokey classroom fables. At first, her teaching methods are eager and cheesy -- she tries to explain the internal rhyme structure in a Tupac Shakur song, and it leaves the pupils cold, even laughing. But her determination to get their respect comes through. She works extra jobs to buy them books and take them on school trips. She makes them open up by encouraging them to write about their harrowing experiences at home, where death, drugs and depression are staples in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. And she teaches them to look beyond their immediate worlds -- introducing them to the Holocaust and to a young girl named Anne Frank, who, like them, wrote about the terrifying oppression around her.

All of these moments may be based on true events; they are retold in "The Freedom Writers Diary," a book by Gruwell and her students. But even the movie's darkest and most affecting subjects -- interracial hostility in the classroom and schoolyard; the churlish resistance to Erin's innovative teaching approach from a dour principal (a thankless role for super British actress Imelda Staunton); a deteriorating relationship between Erin and her husband (Patrick Dempsey) -- don't feel informed by history so much as heavy-handedly manufactured from it.

This is not to say that -- for the audience looking for those reliable highs, lows and eventual successes -- "Freedom Writers" won't be satisfying. But to these classroom-movie-fatigued eyes, the satisfactions amount to feel-good pornography, in which some base instinct is serviced without heft, grace or subtlety. The performances by the younger actors, including recording star Mario and April Lee Hernandez, are full of verve and conviction. And the underlying messages about respecting students and expecting great things of them will surely warm the heart of any moviegoer. But the ultimate effect of "Freedom Writers" is only theatrical, merely Pavlovian: We respond to the performances as audience members but not as true believers. No sooner have we walked away from this movie than all those take-home pearls of wisdom, rallyings of the spirit and courageous gestures by students who didn't know they had it in them to excel, fade away. We have experienced a sort of Chinese food poignancy, the kind that may seem satisfying at the time but ultimately leaves us hungering for more, for something authentic. Maybe that's why we keep coming back.

Freedom Writers(123 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for violence, harsh themes and profanity.