I can appreciate a movie’s vision and empathize with a protagonist without approving of the protagonist’s actions. Films like She’s Lost Control, Concussion (2013) and The Woodsman are fascinating movies with problematic premises: the sex therapist turned stalker, the housewife turned hooker and the ex-con pedophile. They are provocative movies that make you relate to someone that you would ordinarily only view in sensational, prurient ways. Sadly A Teacher never is able to go beyond the superficial pathology of a woman teacher having a sexual relationship with her male student or as I like to call it, rape.
A Teacher takes great pains to depict it as consensual and showing the student as the dominant partner who encourages his teacher to go beyond her comfort level and better judgment, but considering that it is shown from her point of view, and we know that she is an unreliable character if not completely delusional and unable to function socially with people her own age, I am suspect of her perception. To be fair, we don’t know the age of the teenager or the teacher; however the power differential puts it out of bounds as far as I’m concerned. In Texas, the age of consent is seventeen, or the permissible age difference is three years.
The soundtrack reflects her mental space, but A Teacher never goes further to explore her character except her compulsion overriding her common sense, if she ever had any. We get no sense of who she was before this relationship, how it got started or how it changed her so I was left the impression that she is an unchanging ball of crazy and exploitation with an illusion of average unquestioned until she cannot help but out herself. In a brief, nonjudgmental scene, her brother expresses concern and seems to be caring for their mother, but makes no passive aggressive digs at her lack of participation. He does let her know that their mother misses her. She has a roommate who knows that she is involved with a guy, but seems to be clueless that her friend is as messed up. We see her unraveling and understand that what she sees in this relationship is something completely different from what is occurring, but the problem existed before it ever started. She is stuck, but we never get a sense why-whether it is because of trauma or it was the best time of her life or is she is just plain awful. She seems to believe that people know more about her than they do then makes it a reality. She lives a life of furtive paranoia and pleasure. She likes to violate taboos.
A Teacher definitely wanted me to feel bad for her as the needy psycho chick, but I had no sense of her as a person other than a person compelled to rape a boy then pretend that he is Prince Charming and not a kid trying to escape her nuttiness. It is literally the only part of her personality that defines her. A good actor can occasionally give more than what is on the page, but I got nothing but evasiveness, skittishness and impulse. Every other part of her life is a routine that she rushes through and gets no pleasure from. She is not good at her job. I’m sorry, but the chick in Get Out was evil, and this one needs to be fired, in jail and get therapy until she learns the difference between right and wrong. I think that it is so gimmicky to make her the victim when in real life, teachers who behave similarly do not even get ruffled once caught. The most effective cinematic depiction of a sympathetic woman teacher as pedophile is Notes on a Scandal, and even that movie pulls punches by rationalizing that it is about loneliness, not power, dominance and sex. Were the Catholic priests lonely? The hypocrisy is stunning when the gender is reversed. Do you remember People Magazine’s gauzy profile of Mary Kay Letourneau? It is usually not this damaging for the teacher.
I was open to a challenging experience, but the lack of character development and exploration of her psyche made A Teacher not worth the seventy-five minutes that I spent watching it. Skip it.