Or perhaps not. The Emperor's Club carefully sets itself up as an obvious, transparent morality play, and then just as deliberately refuses the easy payoff. This is both impressive and a little disingenuous: the film is in effect congratulating itself for refusing to offer a neat and tidy view of life without offering much else. At the end, Hundert, who has always held to the Heraclitean belief that character is destiny, muses that a man's life (and only men's lives figure importantly in this world) cannot be defined by a single success or failure. As my screening companion, an estimable teacher and scholar in her own right, was heard to mutter in response to this epiphany, "No duh.''
Life, the movie concludes, is not as simple as most movies like it would have you believe, but it doesn't manage to make the characters complex enough to make this an insight rather than an axiom. The Emperor's Club succeeds finally in being more realistic than you expect it to be, which isn't quite enough. Hundert's smug self-regard is hard to separate from Kline's, which comes through most strongly when the character cracks the shell of his priggishness to show warmth or humor.
The younger actors, especially Dano and Jesse Eisenberg, as a bright, skittish boy named Masoudi, have the right mix of anxiety and bravado, but the St. Benedict's boys are as thinly conceived as the minor adult characters. These include, in addition to Davidtz's character, Elizabeth (the only one in the picture referred to solely by her given name), a portly, benevolent headmaster (Edward Herrmann) and an ambitious young instructor (Rob Morrow) who embody, in turn, the nobility and the political scheming that lurks even in fictitious bastions of social privilege.
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