Dangerous Minds

Louanne Johnson (Michelle Pfeiffer) has left the Marines, is out of a marriage and needs a job. Her friend Hal Griffith (George Dzundza) finds her one: a class of teenagers at a Californian high school whom the rest of the staff have given up on, and a year to teach them English. John N. Smith directs from a screenplay by Ronald Bass, taken from Johnson’s own book, and the film fits her year into the shape the classroom drama has had since The Blackboard Jungle: hostile class, unlikely teacher, one breakthrough, one setback, a speech. It runs 99 minutes, Pfeiffer is good in it, and almost nothing around her rings true.

On her first day she turns up in a tweed jacket and a long skirt, and the class has her measured before she has written her name on the board. She goes home, comes back in a leather jacket, and announces that she knows karate. We laughed, and then felt a little embarrassed, because the film means this to be the moment the class comes round, and the class comes round. Bobbie Read’s costumes are doing most of the character work here, and they do it in a day. Pfeiffer gets away with the rest by refusing to push. She plays Johnson as someone faintly amused by her own methods, never raising her voice, treating every insult as a question worth answering, and she is the one thing in the picture that feels like a person rather than a device.

The pupils fare worse. Emilio Ramirez (Wade Dominguez) scowls from the back row and is the one she has to win. Raul Sanchero (Renoly Santiago) is the joker, Callie Roberts (Bruklin Harris) the clever girl who writes poems, Gusmaro Rivera (Roberto Alvarez) and Cornelius Bates (Marcello Thedford) the chorus. Bass gives each of them one trait and one grievance, and no life beyond the school gates. Dominguez has real stillness and Santiago has charm, and both are made to deliver speeches explaining themselves where a better script would have let us work it out. Johnson’s method, which is to promise everyone an A to start with and let them keep it, is presented as a revelation. We kept waiting for the film to notice that this is a trick, and that tricks run out.

Pierre Letarte lights the school in clean, even California sunshine, and Donald Graham Burt’s production design gives it bright corridors, unscratched lockers and a classroom with tall windows. It is a well-kept building full of children the film insists are beyond reach, and the two facts are never made to meet. Tom Rolf cuts the lessons into montage, so that weeks of teaching pass in a verse of whatever is on the soundtrack, and the hard part is skipped. Lisa Coleman and Wendy Melvoin’s score is soft keyboards under the quiet scenes, and the songs do the louder work.

The adults are sketches. Courtney B. Vance plays the principal, George Grandey, as a man more exercised by whether people knock on his door than by what they have come to say, and it is one note held for the length of the film. Robin Bartlett’s Carla Nichols is the colleague who doubts, and Lorraine Toussaint’s Irene Roberts gets even less. Then Beatrice Winde arrives as Mary Benton, a grandmother who tells Johnson flatly that her boys have no use for poetry and that she should find some other poor children to save. It is the only moment the film’s argument is answered back, and we sat up. The film moves on and never asks the question again.

Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer produced it, with Pfeiffer, and it carries their habits: a problem stated, a montage, a triumph. Set beside Stand and Deliver (1988), which let its teacher be tedious and its pupils bored for weeks before anything changed, it looks in a hurry to be finished. It is not cynical; it plainly wants these children to do well. It cannot imagine that wanting might not be enough.

It opened in Britain on 17 January 1996. Watch it for Pfeiffer, who is better than the material and never lets on, and for Dominguez, who holds a back row with a look. The rest is a lesson plan.