137. Educating Rita

Song - Geef Mij Je Angst (Guus Meeuwis)

Movie: Educating Rita (Lewis Gilbert, 1983)

Educating Rita shows in its opening scene a professor walking to his office. He is accompanied by classical music, emphasising the majestic grandeur and history of the university buildings and lawns, only to reveal in the next few scenes that the professor, Frank Bryant, (Michael Caine) is a drunk mediocrity giving lectures to pretentious, spoiled, students. He perks up only when he tutors hairdresser Rita (Julie Walters), a blunt woman, with an extremely pronounced working-class accent, who has decided to enroll in open university to have an education. It only gets more 'populist' from here. 

The film is based on a play that apparently only takes place in the office of the professor. Gilbert opens it up, but only literally not cinematically. We visit other places (e.g. the homes of both Rita and Frank, a bar, university halls, etc), but none of those ever really come alive. Especially during the early scenes, the film is stiff and awkward, partly because of unimaginative blocking and partly because of some odd narrative jumps in time. I have also never found Caine (with the exception of Hannah and Her Sisters) or Walters greaty compelling, and am not quite sure what they did here to deserve an Oscar nomination. My favorite performance in the film is actually given by one Malcolm Douglas. He doesn't appear to have had much of a film career, but here he plays Denny, Rita's dim incurious husband. Douglas never overplays or accentuates his narrow-mindedness, understanding that for Denny there is nothing special about that. Films, especially American ones, most of the time like to portray stupidity as comic relief, or they employ it as a metaphor. But Denny here is just an ordinary dimwit and the film's intent with his character is nothing more than to give an authentic honest portrayal of a dimwit. Douglas plays him completely sincerely without ever feeling the need to signal that he is smarter than his character. 

Denny is also involved in the one sequence of the film which is absolutely perfect. When invited by Frank for dinner with his family and friends, Rita arrives outside his home to see through the window 'cultured' people having 'cultured' conversations. Afraid to go in, she turns back to meet Denny in a bar. He is there with her parents and other friends, singing songs of/in quiet desperation. This is a simple scene that communicates more about the forgotten lives of the British poor than other films manage in their entire running time. It's also a rather damning indictment of British society, especially when the next morning Rita confesses to Frank what she did and tells him she feels like a "half-caste".   

Unfortunately, here is where the film's hypocritical and rather malicious politics come in. After identifying that Britain's enormous class differences almost make it a caste society, and after identifying that this makes the poor lead isolated, desperate lives, it goes on to justify that organisation of society, and to argue that it's good for the poor. And it uses the language of populism to do so. In the end the film's point is that the working class should get educated to see that the lives of the educated class are nothing special and should be rejected. Rita should not "rise above her station", because she is too good for that. It's utter bollocks, but also the performative populism/anti-elitism of the film is condescending and contemptuous and ultimately in service of the people it pretends to criticise. Which is also what makes it fascinating. It may not be a very good film, but it's a really great historical document. You often hear these days that Reagan and Thatcher were the true precursors of Trump and Brexit. There are some good arguments against that, mainly that their politics contributed to European integration and the dissolution of borders in Europe. But then you see something like Educating Rita, made in the midst of Thatcherism, and you wonder how anyone could not see the connection between 80's conservatism and modern populism.