A Teacher (2013) Reviews

• Teacher's Pet

  abcvision2013-03-19

  Director Hannah Fidell got the idea of the movie Teacher while she worked at a restaurant waitress and was attracted to a young patron. She wondered how this would happen to a teacher. We often hear of older men and younger women, but how about the older woman, younger man? In A Teacher, Diana is a teacher at a suburban Texas high school. She has a strain relationship with her family and has few intimate friends. She crosses the lines and begins a sexual affair with a student Eric. In it, she is taken away to reignite the excitement of youthful lust and adapts to the world of quickies, sexting, and fantasy of her young suitor. Besides the ethical dilemma, she is carried away to continue this fantasy to a point of no return. This movie does a good job to show the humanity of Diana who simply craves emotional intimacy that she blocks from the thick wall around her. I saw this film as part of the Atlanta Film Festival.

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• Captivating subtlety in both performance and script

  leilajane942014-07-09

  I have just read some of the above reviews and feel as though they have no emotional integrity whatsoever. When I watch a movie, I do not want to be spoon-fed information and told what to think. These are obviously the kind of films the above reviewers are accustomed to watching which is a great shame because they are missing out on something more beautiful and pure. By not being obvious, this film engages the mind of the viewer to look more closely at the subtext and form a unique opinion. Life is not black and white; there are many mysteries. A film that captures a truthful aspect of life is one that I always find interesting. Firstly, 'A Teacher' is one of the few movies I have actually seen where a female character's point of view takes the main focus. A very credible character with many human flaws instantly captivates me as I want to read into her actions and form an opinion based on what I notice about her behaviour. To me, she is an adult who, for some reason, is unable to move past her adolescence. There are a couple of clues in the text of the film that highlight her incapability to face the truth like a grown up- one being her refusing to talk about a serious matter regarding her mother when her brother brings it up in conversation. She is living in a fantasy and the relationship with her student allows her to hold on to this dream world in which she lives. The whole way through the film, you are waiting for the moment when reality finally hits home and this creates a beautiful suspense. The soundtrack is also very carefully placed and just hits the right moments. As soon as the film begins we are instantly drawn to this woman's state of mind from the unusually unsettling opening music. I think that each song in the movie has been specifically used to enhance the moods felt by this emotionally unstable schoolteacher. The film begins and ends. It is emotionally engaging and allows us to empathise with the characters as well as reprove them. The unpredictability of the film and the excellent performances held my attention throughout. There is no need to say there was a lack of storyline on screen. Get a heart and a mind and an attention to detail. A story can be told with no words at all. In fact, a thousand words can be portrayed in one simple action. This film has much more substance and desire than a film that needs a heavy script to portray intention. Definitely a thumbs up from me. It has been a while since I've seen a film as good as this.

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• Skims the surface of a deeply complex and interesting issue...and skimming it makes it worse

  secondtake2014-05-02

  A Teacher (2013) A maddening movie that has some gutsy aspects. But there is so much depending on credibility in the character's motivations, you can't quite ever buy the plot. Which is this: a high school teacher gets involved with one of her students. I know this happens now and then, often to national headlines, so that much I like. But we want to see the psychology of a teacher who would do that, and it isn't here. What the director and writer (and leading actress, to some extent) give us is a young woman who takes risks and is obsessed with the young man she begins having sex with. Big risks. Risks so absurd (like kissing him in the classroom after the other students have left) that you wonder if the movie makers had information that this was true, or if they were winging it with no good instincts about how people would act in this situation. Not that it needs to be terribly rational. Obviously here is a case of a teacher losing track of her place in her job, in her life, and of the consequences ahead. The student we believe, just enjoying a good ride with a nutty teacher, somewhat sincere in his liking her but a little baffled by her obsession. I mean he's only a high schooler, and as much as they know a lot about a lot, they don't know about the convolutions of older people's ability to love, and the complications of that. Anyway, there is a lot offered here and very little achieved. To some extent the last scene of the teacher lying on a borrowed bed sums up all of our feelings. Kind of, oh my god, oh my god. Yeah, of course. But with so much dangling and unexplored, this could have been a powerful, valuable, must see drama.

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• All in all, it's worth the 75 minutes, but nothing more.

  JustinBell42013-02-18

  Coming in at 75 minutes, if it were any shorter it would have been a TV Pilot, but if it were any longer I would have hated it. An interesting dive into the mind and emotion of a female teacher who has a sexual relationship with one of her students. Lindsay Burdge, the actress playing the teacher, did an excellent job for most of the movie at being seemingly normal, but obviously mentally unstable. Near the last third of the movie however, she seemed to cross the line of believable and over the top a few too many times for me. The approach of the movie was interesting in that we start well into their relationship, as the teacher's life starts to unravel. The time span of when the movie took place was relatively short, and the movie focused more on her and her emotions than it did on the relationship, which I really liked.

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• Serviceable, but an entirely lukewarm focus

  StevePulaski2013-08-21

  This is a film in A Teacher that is nudging itself, trying to be set free from the restraints and the shortcomings of the finished product. The film trying to break free is a deep, involved character study on a teacher-student relationship that functions because of deep conversation and a mutual understanding between parties. The film we get is an interesting albeit mostly flat examination of an unremarkable teacher-student affair that strides along with sporadic hardships and ends in predictable calamity. Hannah Fidell wanders into mumblecore territory here, as she directors and pens the film about Diana Watts (Lindsay Burdge), a high school English teacher, in her thirties or so, who has been flirting and hanging around with student Eric Tull (Will Brittain). The two hang out frequently - mostly in each others homes so being spotted in public isn't possible - and both enjoy each others company, personality, and intimacy. It doesn't take long, however, for Diana's paranoia to nearly get the best of her, as she tries to keep their relationship closeted, even as Eric begins to turn the other cheek to her at some points. Immediately, this is a story that needs to be told, and this film ostensibly will humanize and maybe justify a teacher-student relationship. However, Fidell unfortunately keeps things too heavily nuanced to be insightful and too subtle to evoke much commentary or humanity. There isn't much to Diana or Eric, and their relationship seems more existent because it's a taboo and it's not normative. There's no real indicator on why they're together in the first place. We don't see why Eric has captured her eye, as he is just a typical, faceless high school teenager that comes to class everyday, does his work, and is quietly anxious sexually. There's no justification as to why Diana would want to date a student, or Eric in particular, seeing as if someone found out it could irreparably scar her reputation and put her out of a job. The film I was hoping A Tacher would be featured extensive dialog to develop each character, dialog in the way of both of them talking about why they like each other enough to carry out a dangerous relationship under the noses of classmates and the school administration, and had deeply intimate, satisfying sex. This would be a four star film. The film we have here is one with minimal dialog in the way of characters, a shallow, limited view on why these two would want to be together, and relatively simple sex scenes captured by a grim camera that knows no color scheme other than black or very, very gray. Having said all this, the film does in fact feature a strong lead performance by Lindsay Burdge, whose teacher character is made a sympathetic character, even with out much develop towards her. We can see that she thinks something of this relationship - whatever that may be - and she would be pained deeply if something wrong were to happen with it. If the film didn't have Burdge at the center, at least trying to provide some sort of clarity the character's motivations in this relationship, this would've been a complete misfire. A Teacher is a serviceable, but overly-simple look at a subject that needs strong care and attention to be made human. The characters should've been more identifiable, the sex should've been more powerful and shocking considering the age gap, and the drama should've been thicker. The only thing I thought A Teacher was doing, by the end of it, was simply trying to push transgressive boundaries for the sake of doing so; not because it had something genuinely enlightening or strong to say. Starring: Lindsay Burdge and Will Brittain. Directed by: Hannah Fidell.

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