For all those that have been profoundly affected by a teacher, go see "The Emperor's Club." From what I had seen of the movie before actually seeing it, it looked like a new "Dead Poets Society," with Kevin Kline as the Robin Williams-like sage of a teacher. But what I got out of "The Emperor's Club" was more than I got out of "Dead Poets Society." I got a look at virtue, at the benefit of history in our lives today, and the reality of what it means to live as a teacher.
I have been a high school teacher, and I know what sometimes grueling work can go into minutes worth of classtime. It's tedious, it's draining, but it's also very fulfilling work. Kevin Kline's Mr. Hunert gives a face and a personality to a job that is very unheralded.
"The Emperor's Club" takes place at an elite boarding school called St. Benedict's. Mr. Hunert is the learned professor teaching a class on Western Civilization, the Greeks and the Romans. His style is encapsulated in the adage, "The end is in the beginning." And taking us backward in time through history to make our move forward into the future an educated, civilized move, the film creates the sense of the universal.
Hunert's students are faced with the issues of the past in class as they confront their own issues of the day: hormones, getting into college, and overall, what it means to grow up. By focusing on what happened at a different time and a different place, say ancient Greece or Rome, "The Emperor's Club" makes all of the issues we deal with today: power struggles, morality, the pursuit of recognition for our strivings -- part of the human condition. It communicated a connectedness we have with the world.
The movie centers on one year at St. Benedicts, all of which leads up to the school's annual even of crowning a "Mr. Julius Caesar." Mr. Julius Caesar is an honor bestowed upon the student most deserving of continuing the lineage of earnestness coupled with superior intellect. What the movie focuses on are the lengths to which some people go to achieve recognition. Some are hard workers, some are naturally gifted, and some want to cut any corner on the way to it.
Hunert, meanwhile, is the facilitator of knowledge, the molder of these minds. He comes across, alternately, as intellectual, warm-hearted, and a dedicated teacher to the youths in his trust. However, he wrestles with some of the same issues the students do in carving out his own life, bringing an added dimension of humanness to the character and the movie.
Further, the movie pursues these issues in a longitudinal way by showing us these same students twenty-five years later. It shows how their values have been played out in real life, who the winners and losers are, and really what it means to win and lose.
"The Emperor's Club" is definitely a deeper movie than the usual fare. Though it isn't a perfect movie in respect to some weakly developed subplots, it certainly is a film that should get you inspired the same way many teachers have.
"The Emperor's Club" opens Fri., Nov. 22.
