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.
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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