Interview. Alan Bennett.

Alan Bennett's smash Broadway hit, The History Boys, now arrives in movie theaters with its winning team, director Nicholas Hytner and the solid ensemble cast, intact. David D'Arcy talks with Bennett about England in the 80s, performance vs truth and the state of comedy today.

Related: "[T]he film version of The History Boys is a lesser thing, more fixed in space and time and rendered almost unbearably 'cinematic' in patches by Hytner's gymnastic camerawork," writes Scott Foundas (Voice, LA Weekly). "Yet the ideas and feelings of the piece remain so rich that it almost doesn't matter."

"A few of the early reviews complained that the movie version is no more than a filmed play, which is beside the point," insists David Denby in the New Yorker. "Bennett's conceit is that the classroom is a theatre.... [T]he movie advocates the limited but powerful truth-telling of poetry, as well as ordinary decency and plain speaking. Auden, Larkin, and Orwell are its gods, but only Alan Bennett could have melded the spirit of those three into an entertainment about education. If pleasure is the ultimate teacher, Bennett and his faithful director, Hytner, are superlative pedagogues."

Updated through 11/23.

"The History Boys is both a fine addition to the hoary old tradition of inspirational schoolteacher movies and a startlingly enjoyable subversion of it," argues Alison Willmore at IFC News, where Dan Persons interviews Hytner.

"[T]he film retains the play's quicksilver pace along with an airiness and cheek that vaguely recall the 60s films of Richard Lester," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. While it's "ferociously engaging," it "is not a world-changing work of art. It is exactly what [young tutor] Irwin calls history: entertainment, a scintillating contrivance that is only as good as its epigrams. Below the surface lies a gooey custard filling."

"The movie is brilliant and infectious, much like Bennett's voice: English-deadpan but never snide, and generous to a fault," writes New York's David Edelstein.

"The material has crackle, but its vibrancy feels far off and muted, like a fireworks display going off in a neighboring town," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "That seems to have little to do with the actors... and everything to do with the director, Nicholas Hytner. Hytner, whose other pictures include The Madness of King George and The Crucible, directed The History Boys onstage, which means, theoretically, he's as intimately attuned to the material as anyone could be. But the picture feels static and listless, as if the brightness had been polished right out of it."

"[Richard] Griffiths makes Bennett's erudite soliloquies on poetry, history, and the liberation of the liberal arts not only credible, but deeply moving," writes Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Credible and moving, in spite of the fact that Bennett's film has extremely complicated, rather preposterous, and mildly distasteful things to say about the platonic ideal of men teaching boys."

Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times: "A lively and entertaining disquisition on the purpose and uses of knowledge in a world that cares less about scholarship than quantifiable results, The History Boys asks us to ponder the moral consequences of reducing education to a tool for personal advancement, positing history as the infinitely malleable interpretation of recent events."

Earlier: Jason Clark for Slant; "Plays, 10/13."

Updates, 11/22: "[O]ne of the year's most purely entertaining films," declares Vadim Rizov for the Reeler; "its last-second curveball ending makes it among the most poignant as well."

Online listening tip. A "Spoiler Special" from Slate.

Richard Schickel for Time: "[I]t seems to me that we have been too often in these classrooms, once again asked to be amused by restless lads and to admire their odd-ball teacher. But director Nicholas Hytner's film version of a play everyone thought was 'cinematic' (mostly because it contained some film pieces) is an improvement on the original.... The History Boys remains what it has always been - watchable, mildly witty, not particularly gripping."

Update, 11/23: It's Armond White in the New York Press: "Bennett peddles a none-too-subtle yet specious theory about sexual orientation: Every student is gay or else is a poofter-in-training."

Posted by dwhudson at November 21, 2006 7:59 AM