** (out of ****)
Starring Jack Black, Joan Cusack, Mike White, and Sarah Silverman
Directed by Richard Linklater & written by Mike White
2003
108 min PG13
When I was at the conservatory—by the way, I went to music school for a while—one of my classmates said that jazz died when it began to be taught in schools.
So what is rock music, anyway? Originally it was music of defiance and rebellion, but now it’s a canned, pre-packaged, harmless, and artificial rebellion. It’s an opiate for the masses. If you want to feel rebellious and you wear your cap forward, you listen to heavy metal. If you wear your cap backwards, you put in some rap, and if you fancy yourself one of the “smart” people you put in Evanessence. But really, can you imagine a kid who doesn’t like rock, rap, or country NOT getting his ass kicked? How rebellious is that?
And so we have “School of Rock,” whose chief image is of rock music being taught in a private school classroom of ten-year-olds. Not how to play the instruments—chords and rhythms and whatnot—but how to rock: establishment-sponsored defiance of the establishment. Yes, I know the teacher (Jack Black, front man of the band Tenacious D) is a fraud there under false pretenses, I know he fancies himself to be rebelling. But what is he doing if not teaching children the look of defiance, how to assume the stances, poses, and postures of angst and anger, how to jump around in the exact same way that every rocker has jumped around before? What is he doing if not showing them a socially accepted ritual for venting frustration? What is “School of Rock” if not proof positive that nothing in pop music is sincere, but just a learned thing?
Okay, maybe I’m going off the deep end here and am essentially complaining that there’s no Easter Bunny or that actors are just faking it. But how’s this: “School of Rock” is also a pretty tedious, predictable affair, the kind of tedium whose very inevitability saps the humor out of scenes and situations that would otherwise be funny. Think of it like an Adam Sandler movie. Sandler is a penniless loser who needs to get money to save the orphanage, grandma’s house, and/or the family company, and in doing so prove to himself and/or his parents and/or his girlfriend that he’s not a loser. To do so, Sandler must enter the professional golf circuit, learn the world of business, adopt a child, and/or go through school all over again. At first he will be hated, then his inner spunk will allow him to succeed, he will be loved, but authority figures will be suspicious until finally, at the end, through a winning game, speech, and/or grand gesture, everyone who once hated him will be won over. Except some people who really, deeply hated him, who will be humiliated. The night before he wins everywhere over, all will appear to be lost, when one of those whom he won over earlier will remind Sandler of something Sandler said, inspiring our hero to give it one more go.
Except in “School of Rock” instead of Adam Sandler we have Jack Black. The setup is that he’s a loser aspiring rock star who needs to, you guessed it, raise money to pay rent. He also needs to prove to his best friend (Mike White) that he’s not a loser, and get his best friend’s nagging girlfriend off his back (Sarah Silverman, in a thankless, one-note role). To this end he connives his way into a substitute teaching position, where he teaches the children how to rock, and enters them in a Battle of the Bands where he will win over everyone who hated him with a spectacular performance. He doesn’t teach the children how to play their instruments, because they already learned that in their orchestra class. Instead he teaches them that classical music sucks, which we can assume is an opinion that no one needs to be taught because I think the statistic is that less than two per cent of Americans regularly listen to classical music anyway.
I like Jack Black. He was magnificent in “High Fidelity,” a much better movie about how anal and asinine people can get about the narrow little world of American pop music, and everything I’ve seen and heard of Tenacious D is so funny it’s almost stupefying. I laughed at him telling the children that they won’t be learning anything because he has a hangover, and then having to explain the difference between a hangover and being drunk. He has one of the most animated faces in show business; watch it as he casually discards math, or when he’s telling the children they’re wrong for liking Christina Aguilera and Liza Minnelli (well, we can’t have nonconformists in the School of Rock, can we?).
I like the aura of deranged reverence he uses when discussing Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Motorhead, and all those other bands from the ‘70s that I’ve never gotten around to listening to. Between The Doors and The Ramones I’m just a black hole. I like all his crazy posturing, flinging his head around and grimacing and being so absolutely dead serious about rocking and singing about demons and the end of the world. Then again, I also like Adam Sandler, and the only movie of his that doesn’t feel like a chore is the only one where he doesn’t have to go through all the crap I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. It’s called “Punch-Drunk Love” and it won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival.
Black is joined by Joan Cusack as the uptight principal who Learns an Important Lesson At the End of the Movie and a bunch of cute kids who mug a lot and don’t quite achieve distinct personalities. Amazingly, the movie is directed by low-budget Austin-ite Richard Linklater, whose “Waking Life” is one of the best films of 2001. Linklater gives the movie a solid, professional look, better than all those non-Cannes winning Sandler films, and is even quite electric with the performance scenes. All the children can really play and Linklater lets his camera wander among them like any good concert film. (As a rule I tend to dislike rock songs that actually use the word “rock” in their lyrics, an exception being “I Love Rock ‘n Roll Music” by Donovan, which is a really amazingly cynical little ditty.) But one has to ask: with movies like “Waking Life” and “Slacker” under Linklater’s belt, isn’t this a little, well, beneath him?
But people are comforted by the predictable steps of movies like this and the temporary sense of defiance they get from overproduced, overpaid, super-slick studio rock groups. I don’t like “School of Rock’s” formula, and I never have. Maybe my inability to appreciate it is my failing as a critic. Maybe it was wrong of me to think I could enjoy “School of Rock” in the same week that I watched “Cries and Whispers” and “The Sting.” But I would be remiss in my duties as a critic to not relay my genuine emotions about a film. Hmm…“The Sting.” Now there’s a movie with great music.
Finished April 25th, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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