Author: Anne McCormick
Date: 9 May 2020
The Kindergarten Teacher, 2018
Drama film
Director: Sara Colangelo
Actors: Maggie Gyllenhaal (Lisa)
Based on The Kindergarten Teacher by Nadav Lapid.
I like watching films about unusual people: about geniuses, child prodigies, psychos, etc. In general, it is much more interesting to me than films about ordinary people. After watching the movie Secretary (2002), I accidentally came across The Kindergarten Teacher. And my amazement knew no bounds: in the leading role was the same brilliant actress Maggie Gyllenhaal! Well, wouldn't you call that luck? In this film, The Kindergarten Teacher, she played a forty-year-old woman, Lisa.
I'll say right away that this film is beyond the ordinary. Perhaps you have never seen anything like it. No, there is no action, and the movie proceeds measuredly, with quiet plot development. Only in the finale does the film make an incredible turn! And all because women are very fiery at the age of 40.
Lisa has adult children who already have their own adult life. Also, Lisa has an uninteresting husband, work, and hobbies. One of her hobbies is pretty unusual for a kindergarten teacher. Lisa loves poetry, knows a lot about it, and tries to write poetry herself. The 40-year-old kindergarten teacher also attends a poetry class where budding poets gather. It is the theme of Lisa's whole life: reaching for poetry, and not finding harmony in her own life, with her own matured children.
And suddenly, a bright ray of light illuminates Lisa's dull life. A five-year-old boy, Jimmy, a pupil of Lisa, speaks impressive poems. No, it was unbelievable that such a little boy wrote such beautiful and such adult poems! Nevertheless, this is a fact. A soul of a dead poet must have been living in a new body because Jimmy speaks almost brilliant verses. And Lisa knows a lot about this. She is shocked and is trying to make the boy's talents visible to his parents, the poets from her poetry class, kindergarten workers, and even members of her family. But nobody responds to Lisa's attempts to shine the light on her student's talents. Lisa realizes the value of the boy's talent and makes every effort to ensure that not a single poem is gone. She makes sure everything gets recorded. Jimmy, as soon as he has a new verse, should inform his teacher about it. For these purposes, Lisa even gave little Jimmy her phone number! The boy understood everything correctly and reported new verses with the phrase: "I have a poem!" To Lisa's delight, she starts hearing more and more of these words from her brilliant student.
Lisa acts like an obsessed person. She is aware of her responsibility for the talent of the little poet since no one else wanted to share this responsibility with her. Lisa secretly arranges Jimmy's performance in Manhattan, among poets, but no one wants to take the boy thoughtfully. In some scenes, Lisa frightened me with her obsession. In others, she made me sympathize with her. I won't tell you what this path had lead to, but believe me, it is unpredictable!
The Kindergarten Teacher is a great movie, one of my favourites. I admired actress Maggie Gyllenhaal in the movie Secretary, but in this film, I fell in love with her acting even more.
All the other characters were not so significant. The talented boy Jimmy surprised me only with his poems, but not at all with anything else - he was ordinary in everything else.
Josie Rourke
Roman Polanski
Michael Gracey
John Hughes
Dan Scanlon
Stanley Kubrick