“Sucking the marrow out of life doesn’t mean choking on the bone.”
Like many of Peter Weir’s films—The Mosquito Coast, The Truman Show, Master and Commander—Dead Poets Society examines a group of people in isolation. In this case it’s a fraternity of teenage boys at an elite boarding school in Vermont that emphasizes the values of tradition, honor, discipline, and excellence. All of these young lads (Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, Josh Charles, Gale Hansen, Dylan Kussman, Allelon Ruggiero, James Waterston) are being primed for upper class careers, to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, bankers, that sort of thing.
Into this strict, stodgy, stuffy milieu steps Professor Keating (Robin Williams), a freethinking renegade who had formed the unsanctioned Dead Poets Society back when he had been a student at the prep school. He instructs his students to rip pages out of their textbooks, to stand on their desks to see a different perspective, to seize the day. The boys buy what he has to sell and soon they’re huddled up in a nearby cave sharing their bohemian impulses and encouraging one another to live life on their own terms. One of them takes a part in a local production of a Shakespeare play. Another asks out a cheerleader (Alexandra Powers) from the nearby public school. Conflict comes in the form of an overbearing father (Kurtwood Smith) who doesn’t like Keating’s influence on these impressionable young minds.
Unfortunately, despite a solid cast, the script’s moral divisions and drastic behaviors are too exaggerated to ring true. Still, in Weir’s hands this maudlin material comes together nicely. His delicate touch imbues the old school grounds with an ethereal air even as his fluid camera emphasizes the students’ struggle against the constraints of the inflexible institution.
The film is set in 1959, a good few years before expressive individualism became the default contemporary worldview. It depicts the liberating power of art, makes poetry exciting, and shows the value of a teacher who cares, which are all positive things. And yet I find myself siding with the parents, professors (Leon Pownall, George Martin), and administrators (Norman Lloyd) who suggest that the ability to think for oneself comes not after hearing a slogan from Thoreau or Whitman but at the end of a long educational journey that will necessarily include many instances of humble acquiescence.
To wit, the tragedy that occurs late in the film (arranged in an arresting, otherworldly style that reminded me of Weir’s The Last Wave) is the direct result of a young, unformed mind being set free prematurely and then crumbling under the weight of the world. What’s interesting is that in our current culture, the ideologies depicted in the film are reversed—personal fulfillment is seen as the highest good and emphasized accordingly in education, and earnest submission to traditionalal learning structures is basically radical. A true independent thinker would not rip pages out of a book willy-nilly, but someone who is yet incapable of thinking for themselves might be persuaded to do so. You can’t bend and break the rules in a new and exciting way until they’re deeply embedded. Do you know what might, in time, lead to such confident and effective personal expression? A commitment to tradition, honor, discipline, and excellence.