I was not aware that HBO, that Game of Thrones channel, actually makes their own films. Now, that’s pretty bad on my end, knowing that they make TV shows, documentaries, but apparently movies wasn’t something that I thought that they would do. Bad Education came out last year and made me aware that HBO can make movies. That’s a bit disingenuous, I was literally not expecting anything with this film. Except that Hugh Jackman was in it. Putting it out there, his role as Wolverine in the X-Men films helped a lot by passing off the idea that he’s American or Canadian since Wolvie is a Canuck. Anyways, here’s what I think about this great film. SPOILERS will appear in the review.
1. Tragedy Makes Great Drama
Like most films, it’s based on a true story which you’d never heard. All of it takes place in Long Island, New York at Roslyn High School where we see Jackman playing superintendent Frank Tassone. He is a respected person in the school among the students and faculty. We also get to see Rachel played by Geraldine Viswanathan who is a student newspaper writer for the school paper. She asks Dr. Tassone and his assistant about the high school’s skywalk. As Rachel goes over the school’s finances, everything starts to go south, for the faculty.
It’s great drama for a good hour and 48 minutes. Jackman does a great job of playing the guy and he is just likeable. What sells us is that his character was a former teacher and has this great connection with everyone. The problem is that he’ll turn a switch when he is confronted with any problem that threatens him. The scene with him and Rachel in the school grounds highlight it. He figures out what she’s actually writing and tells her that the article she’ll publish will damage her.
The whole movie is not so much on the school system’s problems, but more so that Tassone was unable to stop from the egregious spending that was going on. That exceeded millions of dollars that the school auditor found out and threatened of being fired by Tassone. It’s his personality and lifestyle that really made him a fallen angel. He was also an unfaithful man. Not in a religious sense, but of the cheating variety. I felt bad when his partner was shown a picture by the District Attorney that had Frank and his former student at a house in a Las Vegas suburb.
I think what amplifies this type of drama is the dedication that Rachel has for the article, which was supposed to be a fluff piece for a school renovation. I love the idea that her Dad was happy to help her track down the companies that was tied to the school’s invoices. And the whole perspective that her Dad was tied to a financial crime and he could’ve raised his voice about it but didn’t.
2. School Bureaucracy
Does this school have so much behind the scenes drama and politics like, wow. When word gets out that Tassone’s assistant Pam played by Allison Janney has a family member who splurges on the school’s business card, Frank throws her under the bus when the initial financial report was around $200,000. Not just him but the entire front office staff tried to figure out how exactly to cover it up. It makes you think how anything that were to happen in your high school would react to something like this.
Another thing that I noticed is that there’s one parent who sees Frank twice in the film. Both in the beginning and near the end of the film, the parent begs him to have her son be in an advanced class. The final part is one of the best moment in the entire film. Frank sees that the student is having difficulty reading a letter that was written by the mother. He keeps struggling on the word “accelerate”. So much so, that Frank helps him and use the analogy that the student is like a racecar being restrained.
We see that for as much as Frank is seen as a asshole to the parent, he is proving a point that every teacher and administrator is seen as the problem for not helping their kid. Him just getting so frustrated with everything about the school administration and having a parent try to ask for a favor. He wants to help, but can’t. It would’ve been easy to make him one note, and the entire administration corrupt. They were just caught in something that was building up and had no idea how to deal with it.
3. All The Superintendent’s Men
Aside from one man’s fall from grace, it’s a good newspaper drama. I thought that the stuff with Rachel and her Editor would just be around the background when we see Frank’s life slowly turn upside down. It’s one of those things where if you’ve never heard of this story and all it took was a high school newspaper to break story so massive, you or anyone would believe any ounce of it. I think what drives her to make the paper more than just a simple one is just her digging more. Which is actually prompted by Tassone to tell her to make it more worthwhile.
I feel that’s just dramatic irony in a way that, she eventually finds enough dirt of what’s going on that it comes back and wrecks havoc on the faculty. I’m not saying that this film is anywhere close to All The President’s Men, but it’s up there. More on the person than the actual event.
4. Overall
This is one of those hidden gems of a movie that you need to have HBO in your cable service or sign up for HBO Max. As far as I know and I can be wrong, but I think there’s only a digital copy of the film that is available online. Bad Education was one of the worthwhile movies that I saw when I was lockdown during a pandemic.
Bad Education gets a four out of five.
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