'The Emperor's Club' teaches us success and failure are relative

Most of The Emperor's Club, adapted from a short story by Ethan Canin, takes place on the green, pastoral campus of St. Benedict's, an all-male boarding school where the sons of the ruling class are trained in the classics, ethics and the proper knotting of school ties.

The time is the mid-1970's, but the most important aspect of the setting is its nostalgic aura of timelessness. Apart from the length of the boys' hair and the sound of a James Gang record being played before curfew, it might as well be the 1950s or any decade after the American Civil War.

Even when the film flashes forward in its second half to the co-educational, multicultural present day, it insists on continuity rather than change. Schools like this, it suggests, are still where power is passed on, character is molded and choices are made that change the lives of teachers and students alike.

And movies set in schools like this one are exactly where you expect to see these choices and their consequences dramatized. The cleverest thing about The Emperor's Club, which opens tomorrow, is that its style and methods hew closely to the conventions of prep-school melo-drama (rent Dead Poets Society if you need to brush up) even as the story quietly subverts them.

At the center of the drama, which is at times so small and understated that it hardly deserves the name, is William Hundert, a teacher of classics and ancient history played by Kevin Kline with a smirk of intellectual superiority and enunciation as crisp as the creases of his wool slacks. Though Hundert -- as he is almost universally addressed -- is stiff backed and proper, hints of pyschological complexity hang off him like threads of frayed tweed. He lives in the shadow of his father, a famous scholar, and in a state of repressed longing for one of his colleagues' wives (Embeth Davidtz).

These subplots are stitched on to the main narrative with annoying haphazardness, as though the director, Michael Hoffman, and the screenwriter, Neil Tolkin, were trying to cover up the essential thinness of Hundert's character. He is less a person than a walking moral problem and is in fact more interesting as an ethical puzzle than as a pyschological study.

A devoted teacher, Hundert believes himself to be a moral guide as well as a source of information and his self-confidence is tested by an especially difficult student, a senator's son named Sedgewick Bell (Emile Hirsch). Until young Bell's arrival in the middle of the term it seems that St. Benedict's has been untroubled by any discipline problems beyond that James Gang song and an occasional shortcut across the manicured grass of the quadrangle. But the new boy brings with him a trunk full of period-appropriate rebel paraphernalia: skin mags, cigarettes, French movie posters, a picture of chairman Mao. (Surely a copy of The Catcher in the Rye must be in there somewhere.) "Mr." Bell -- as he is called according to the customs of St. Benedict's -- is lazy and insolent, and also charismatic, leading his nerdy classmates on some mildly naughty adventures.

But Hundert, as any competent teacher in the movies must, sees Sedgewick as a diamond in the rough and manages to awaken the boy's slumbering intellectual potential. The first part of the movie leads up to the school's annual classics competition, and Hundert's desire to help his protegee leads him to commit a tiny infraction, inflating the boy's grade so that he, rather than a more deserving, less colorful fellow (Paul Dano), becomes a finalist in the contest. This lapse sets in motion a sequence of other small compromises and evasions that continue to ramify 25 years later, when young Bell has grown up into a budding corporate bigwig with political ambitions.