3/29/2023 0 Comments The kindergarten teacherShe keeps us guessing about the degree to which Lisa is on a mission to cultivate a truly gifted child, or in desperate, selfish flight from the disappointment and mediocrity of her life. And Anna Baryshnikov is a lovely, dreamy presence as Lisa’s teaching assistant.īut the movie belongs to the luminous Gyllenhaal, who can be simultaneously inscrutable and an open book. Chernus sketches a sweet-natured, devoted man not quite equipped to read the signs of his wife’s midlife crisis. Bernal exudes easy charm with just the slightest hint of smugness. Salazar smartly underplays the shallowness of aspiring actress Becca - whom it’s suggested either is or was sleeping with Jimmy’s dad - to amusing effect. ![]() There’s fine work from the supporting cast, notably the extraordinary young Sevak, who veers between distraction and intuitive perceptiveness with never a false moment. Likewise in her exposure to her poetry teacher as the Salieri to Jimmy’s Mozart, which comes with an added sting when the boy reveals the surprise romantic subject of one of his more memorable odes.Įven as Lisa goes completely rogue, and the suspenseful thriller element is fortified, the tonal mix of searing melancholy and danger is tempered with playful notes. There’s a cruel, sardonic edge to several beautifully observed moments between Lisa and her own family. So Lisa takes charge by insinuating herself more deeply into Jimmy’s life, her ability to separate good intentions from inappropriate behavior becoming increasingly fuzzy.Ĭonsidering that the welfare and stability of a pint-sized kid are at stake, the degree to which humor factors in is remarkable. Nor is Jimmy’s divorced nightclub owner father (Ajay Naidu) keen to encourage the boy toward intellectual pursuits, preferring to steer him into competitive sports and from there into the business world. She reaches out for help from his uncle (Samrat Chakrabarti), a newspaper copy editor with a literary bent, but doesn’t get far. Lisa presents herself as a crusader intent on ensuring that her baby prodigy is given space to thrive. The choice of that most delicate of art forms in Israeli writer-director Lapid’s original story was a smart one, and Colangelo runs with it, posing contemplative questions about all the nuances of expression that are being erased in hyper-connected contemporary life. “The poet is the priest of the invisible,” reads a Wallace Stevens quote on the blackboard. Suddenly, her stock soars, both with the teacher and with the somewhat competitive other students. When Becca complies, Lisa begins reading the freeform compositions as her own work in her evening classes. She grills the boy’s millennial nanny, Becca (Rosa Salazar), asking about similar occurrences, and begs her to write down anything Jimmy comes up with that resembles a poem. The film almost imperceptibly builds evidence of Lisa’s encroaching emptiness, the full extent of which only gradually becomes clear.Ī light is switched on when she hears one of her students, Jimmy Roy (Parker Sevak), a 5-and-a-half-year-old kid of Indian extraction, spontaneously creating a poem of unexpected depth and elliptical beauty while pacing back and forth in a quasi-fugue state. ![]() And her teenage kids are minimally communicative - her daughter (Daisy Tahan) seldom looks up from her phone, while her son (Sam Jules) is quietly making alternative college plans that go against liberal-artsy Lisa’s wishes.Ĭolangelo sketches this situation with swift, economical strokes, complemented by composer Asher Goldschmidt’s fretful score for strings and piano. Even her husband (Michael Chernus), though he’s diligently supportive, is unconvincing in his enthusiasm. Lisa is in the fourth week of an adult-education poetry class taught by a charismatic instructor (Gael Garcia Bernal), whose smiling encouragement doesn’t extend to her pedestrian compositions about flowers and butterflies. Her look of exhaustion suggests fatigue or perhaps boredom, but her gnawing dissatisfaction is revealed to have deeper causes. The first image in the film, shot with limpid widescreen elegance by Pepe Avila del Pino, introduces 40ish Lisa Spinelli (Gyllenhaal), a Staten Island kindergarten teacher for almost 20 years, sitting down for a breather after class on a child-size chair.
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