Review

Culture

Education

7 September 2023

6 min read

Back to school on the big screen

It’s back to school for many. Yaroslav Walker picks his favourite films capturing the friendship, the drama, and the expectation of school life and beyond.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

School students walk across a playground confidently talking and laughing with us

The History Boys.

BBC Films.

The summer is coming to an end, the last BBQ embers are sputtering to sleep, the weather…appears not to have been told, at least in London! Sweltering! Most importantly of all, our children are back to school, nursery or college. In light of this momentous time of year here are my top five back to school film choices, one each for the last five decades, and some honourable mentions.

1970s - American Grafitti

A teenage couple dressed in 1950s clothes sit on a kerb in deep conversation.

Charles Martin Smith and Candy Clark in American Graffiti

American Graffiti isn’t just a lovely piece of nostalgia now, it was back then. A misty-eyed look back at 60s Americana, this film is packed with slicked-back hair, classic cars, diners with roller-skating waitresses, and the complexities of teenage romance. Four friends meet on the last day of summer to experience the joys of a California evening one last time before two of them jet off to college ‘back East’. Curt is unsure about his future and is even considering staying in his hometown. Steve is hubristically thrilled about the prospect of fleeing his humdrum life and even shedding his loving girlfriend for new conquests. Terry is insecure and simply desperate to prove he is as good as everyone else, and Milner is the older friend who never left town and is a local-legend drag-racer. Over the course of a long night they go their separate ways, have adventures, and finally find some closure to their ongoing anxieties: one finds new confidence, another begins to take risks, another learns to be happy with his lot, and Milner wins a drag race…oh, an learns the genuine happiness that can be found in adult responsibility. It's too long, but it is a lovely atmosphere to meander about in, and is edited superbly so it never really drags. With superb performances and a soundtrack bursting with 50s and 60s hits, this is well worth a watch.

1980s - The Breakfast Club

Five glum students perch on stools in school room.

Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club.

Well what else could it have been!? In many ways the film set the classic pattern of US High School living (which did and sometimes still does inform UK attitudes) and the High School movie. John Hughes didn’t invent these archetypes and wasn’t the first to put them on celluloid, but he was the master of crystallising them. The Breakfast Club presents an all-day detention that just so happens to have a representative from every social caste of the High School system: Andrew the jock (Emelio Esteves), Brian the nerd (Anthony Michael Hall), Allison the weirdo (Ally Sheedy), Claire the popular girl (Molly Ringwald), and Bender the burnout (Judd Nelson). These five kids have nothing in common but their dislike of the domineering Vice-Principal (Paul Gleason was born for this role!)…OR DO THEY!? Whereas American Graffiti explored the process of maturing into adulthood and the taking charge of one’s sense of self (with a background hum of Vietnam paranoia and the end of golden Americana days), The Breakfast Club is much more forthright in demonstrating just how difficult being a teenager is. These kids don’t need help ‘growing up’, if anything they need to be allowed to be kids. Over the course of the day their defences break down and they learn that each of them has expectations and pressures that seem overwhelming, and grown to have genuine respect and compassion for each other. A script that is sometimes on-the-nose and prone to soliloquy is saved by the sheer bravura of the performances. A go to comfort film, that will always be iconic. Any film which ends with Simple Minds is a 5 star affair for me.

1990s - The Faculty

Two students walk down a school corridor, one looking away.

Elijah Wood and Jordana Brewster in The Faculty.

We move to slightly scarier fare with the 90s. The Faculty asks the question you were all asking…what if Invasion of the Bodysnatchers took place in an American high school? The answer is subtext; a lot of subtext and allegory. You know, when you’re a teenager, everything can seem quite tough. The world can seem like it's against you. It can seem like everyone you know has changed overnight and you’re lost in a sea of hostile faces. It can seem like a parasitic alien is using your school as a beachhead for a planetary takeover. The Faculty is cinematic junk-food and unapologetically so. It is camp and silly and fun. It takes those Hughesian archetypes, puts them on steroids, and then throws them into a plot joyfully riffing on the most classic sci-fi and horror tropes - all held nicely together with a quip-filled Kevin Williamson screenplay. An underrated Robert Rodriguez directorial effort which shows that he can work well across genres, and an excellent opportunity to see early performances from Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Jon Stewart, and…wait…is that Usher in that film!?

2000s - The History Boys

Yes, we move to British shores at last. Alan Bennett’s stage-play is brought to beautiful cinematic life by original director Nicholas Hytner, who has an excellent track record of translating Bennett’s work from stage to screen. It’s another flash of nostalgia (which all such films are, as adult writers and directors look back to their own school days and teenage angst and adventure) which transports the viewer to 1980s Sheffield. A group of friends at the local Grammar School have all done very well in their A Levels and are now put to the task of preparing for the Oxford entrance exams. All are lovers of History (well, maybe not Rudge) and have received an enviously eclectic education in the full gamut of culture from the eccentric and long-suffering Hector. Like all the films above, The History Boys explores the challenges of adolescence, but with a specific focus on ‘doing well’ in a particularly British way. Sporting excellence or popularity aren’t the measure of student success - Oxbridge is. The teachers don’t push the young men nearly as much as they do themselves, seeing a place at Oxford as the best form of advancement. The witty and moving script also touches on the issue of infatuation, attraction, sexual fluidity, and chaste reciprocity: Posner’s love for Dakin being encouraged only so far in some sort of mutually agreed stand-off, Dakin’s willingness to sleep with the substitute teacher Irwin, and (of course) Hector’s tradition of giving the boys a ride home on his motorcycle and…appreciating them aesthetically. Not easy subject matter, but written and directed and shot and performed with such sensitivity that you can’t help but fall in love with every character.

2010s - The Inbetweeners Movie

Two students look at each in in incomprehension.

Blake Harrison and Simon Bird in The Inbetweeners.

We end with crudity. Crudity and friendship and a booze-filled week in Crete. Lovers of the TV show (I was one) - which explored the trials and tribulations of four unpopular, unremarkable, and unfortunate teens at a British comprehensive school- were well served by this upgrade. TV comedies, like plays, rarely translate well; The Inbetweeners Movie is an honourable exception. Will, Simon, Jay, and Neil have come to the end of their school days and decide that they need one final hurrah before they go their separate ways. The proceeding 90 minutes is a torrent of drunken antics, foul-mouthed discourse, and crass toilet humour, all threaded together by hapless and fruitless sexual intrigue. 90 mins of that might seem like it would wear thin, but The Inbetweeners Movie is too kind-hearted to go stale (unlike its successor which was a genuinely squalid and unpleasant affair which had me questioning humanity). The four young men are so pathetic in the true sense of the word, that you can’t help but cheer for them. The overall message of friendship as a virtue that transcends the ups-and-downs of life give the salty humour a sweet edge. For a certain generation - mine - this might be the definitive British school movie.

Honourable Mentions

Grease

Sort of like American Graffiti…but better. I’m talking Travolta, I’m talking Newton-John, I’m talking songs that are bullet-proof! Graffiti is on the official list because it speaks to the many cultural and political undercurrents of the time…but Grease is so much more fun. If you can only see one of the two, see Grease!

Gregory’s Girl

Pipped by Breakfast because of the archetypes and Simple Minds, but probably one of the finest British rom-coms ever!

Mean Girls

Obviously. It's so fetch!

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Politics

War & peace

18 December 2024

6 min read

Watching Bonhoeffer from below

Does a new biopic capture a compelling and complex character?

David Emerton

David Emerton is Director of St Mellitus College, East Midlands.

Two men, dressed in the style of the 1940s look around shocked.

Jonas Dassler as Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Angel Studios.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not live to see his 40th birthday.

Sentenced to death in a sham trial at Flossenbürg concentration camp, he was stripped naked, led to the gallows, and executed on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler in April 1945, essentially for treason. Ever since, Bonhoeffer’s life and thought has been subject to projects in wish fulfilment. Bonhoeffer has been secularised, liberalised, radicalised, and popularised by people across the religious and political spectrum, and in ways that evidence only casual concern for historical fact and little (or no) comprehension of his literary estate. Most recently and remarkably—in fact, repulsively—Bonhoeffer’s name has even been used by the right-wing Heritage Foundation to denounce the so-called “open-borders activism” and “environmental extremism” of the American Left in its Project 2025 wish list for the presidency of President-elect Donald Trump.

It was with mixed feelings, therefore, that I sat down in a movie theatre in downtown San Diego a few weeks ago to watch the new film Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. Released by the Christian production company, Angel Studios, and written and directed by Todd Komarnicki (producer of Elf and writer of Sully), the film (coming to UK cinemas in early 2025) is trailered thus:

“As the world teeters on the brink of annihilation, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is swept into the epicenter of a deadly plot to assassinate Hitler. With his faith and fate at stake, Bonhoeffer must choose between upholding his moral convictions or risking it all to save millions of Jews from genocide. Will his shift from preaching peace to plotting murder alter the course of history or cost him everything?”

The accompanying image has the pacifist-preaching Bonhoeffer holding a gun.

Like any big-screen biopic, Bonhoeffer mixes fact and fiction with a healthy dollop of artistic and cinematic license. This license is of course necessary for the screenwriting art: time needs compressing; biography needs enlivening; peoples’ character needs demonstrating; ultimately, the film needs watching.

There is no doubt that Bonhoeffer spent time at Union Theological Seminary in New York and that whilst there he bemoaned the state of American theology, actively participated in the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and became close friends with an African-American student, Frank Fisher.

But learning to play jazz piano at a Harlem nightclub? Being beaten by a racist hotel owner with the butt of a rifle? And becoming an ardent advocate for African-American civil rights?

There is no doubt, too, that, as Hitler rose to power, Bonhoeffer spoke out against the dangers inherent in the Führer concept and that throughout the 1930s he steadfastly critiqued Nazism and national socialist ideology.

But were his words ever these?

“I can’t keep on pretending that praying and teaching is enough.” “Dirty hands ... It’s all that I have to offer.” Or, in response to being asked by his friend and student, Eberhard Bethge, if Hitler is the first evil leader since Scripture was written: “No. But he’s the first one I can stop.”

No one is going to dispute, either, that Bonhoeffer led an underground seminary at Finkenwalde to train future pastors of the Confessing Church in Germany; or that he said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” (Even if, in German, he more literally said, “Every call of Christ leads into death”).

But what is disputable is that (as the film suggests) Finkenwalde was a safe haven from which a plot to assassinate Hitler was launched, and that Bonhoeffer’s most memorable aphorism of Christian discipleship was intended to be spliced (as it is in the film) into footage of a conspirator preparing a suicide bomb.

And Bonhoeffer certainly did join the German Military Intelligence and act as something akin to a double-double-agent. He certainly did pass information about the conspiracy to international church leaders on his travels outside of Germany. He certainly did know about both “Operation Seven” (a plan to smuggle a small group of Jews and Jewish Christians out of Germany to safety in Switzerland), and the planned plot to assassinate Hitler.

But to suggest (as the film does) that Bonhoeffer was central to these plans and personally involved in them, or that he asked Bishop George Bell to lobby Winston Churchill to supply a bomb that the conspirators could use to kill Hitler, is nothing more than highly contentious, even conspiratorial, conjecture.

In a panoply of embellished facts, the film’s final scenes are in equal measure harrowing, arresting, and deeply moving.

Bonhoeffer’s life and thought is obviously compelling.

It is also complex.

Bonhoeffer left behind an array of books, essays, sermons, unfinished manuscripts, working notes, and letters, all of which are notoriously difficult to interpret, especially in the round. Bonhoeffer rides roughshod over this difficulty and complexity, and thereby trivialises the legacy of a modern-day, martyred Christian saint. It also tells in part an untrue story—the story of a man destined, indeed determined, to disavow a life of prayer, teaching, and diplomacy to become a would-be assassin and engage in violent political espionage and activism at any cost.

This is a (very) far cry from the man who, in 1930, urges American Christians to remember that they have brothers and sisters “in every people,” not just in their own, and that if the people of God were united then “no nationalism, no hate of races or classes can execute its designs and ... the world will have its peace.”

It’s a far cry from the man who, in November 1940, writes that “radicalism,” and “Christian radicalism” in particular, “arises from a conscious or unconscious hatred ... toward the world, whether it is the hate of the godless or of the pious.”

And it’s a far cry from the man who, at Christmas 1942, reflects on the “incomparable value” of having learned “to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering.”

Bonhoeffer therefore risks exposing Bonhoeffer’s legacy, as a theologian, pastor, and man of resistance, to yet further abuse. At a time when political and religious discourse is increasingly laced with xenophobic, authoritarian, and nationalistic rhetoric, and at worst Christian nationalistic rhetoric, this is not what is needed. It is not surprising that Bonhoeffer scholars across the world and Bonhoeffer’s own descendants have registered concern.

But is Bonhoeffer nevertheless worth the price of a ticket?

Perhaps surprisingly, I think that it is: if only for its denouement.

In a panoply of embellished facts, the film’s final scenes are in equal measure harrowing, arresting, and deeply moving. Shortly before his execution, Bonhoeffer leads his fellow prisoners in morning prayer, breaking bread and drinking wine with them in commemoration of the death of Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer then walks to the gallows in peace, knowing that for him, as a disciple of Jesus Christ, his death is but the beginning of life.

It is such steadfast hope, in the face of all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions (to borrow some words from Fyodor Dostoevsky), that the church and our world today is perhaps most desperately in need of.

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