Watching the misanthropic comedy Bad Teacher, I was reminded of how my late father-in-law, who supplemented his careers as a tuba player and union boss with a day job in the Chicago public schools as the world’s most cynical substitute teacher, liked to tell this old joke:
“I can’t get a date, Doc,” the new patient griped to his psychiatrist. “See, I sweep up the circus elephants’ droppings and can never wash the stench off me.”
“Perhaps you should get a different job.”
“What, and quit show business?”
The second least glamorous job in showbiz is teaching schoolchildren. It’s standup comedy for the risk-averse. The government employs truant officers to make sure you have an audience, and they can’t fire you if you’re not funny.
For years, resentment of teachers has been mounting. Public-school teachers have health insurance and pensions, but they still can’t get American students to outscore Koreans. If only they’d work harder!
Idealistic young teachers willingly sweat for their students, but once they have kids of their own, their priorities change. Hence, the most common solution that societies have come up with to get their educators—such as Jesuits, nuns, and Eton schoolmasters—to care passionately about other people’s children has been celibacy. (Of course, celibate teachers sometimes wind up caring a little too passionately for their charges.)
The conventional wisdom in America is moving toward informally demanding celibacy of teachers. In 2007’s Freedom Writers, heroic Hilary Swank divorces Patrick Dempsey when he suggests that maybe she should come home from school before he falls asleep so they could someday have a baby.
Yet from the Hollywood perspective of screenwriters Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky (is that a real name?), teaching sounds like a gig for losers. Compared to the starlets they know, most teachers appear underpaid and undersexed.
Thus, they anticipated how shocking and titillating today’s audience would find Bad Teacher’s high concept: Cameron Diaz plays a lazy gold-digging teacher in stiletto heels.
Their intuition proved accurate: Despite a budget of only $19 million and angry reviews from offended critics, Bad Teacher enjoyed a $32-million opening weekend.
Diaz’s anti-heroine plans to teach for one year at an upscale suburban Chicago middle school to prove her respectability to her rich fiancé’s mother. Perpetually hung over, she snoozes at her desk while showing her well-behaved class movies about teachers who inspire students in the ’hood: Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver, Morgan Freeman in Lean on Me, and Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds.
Then the wedding falls through, and so does her summer-vacation Plan B of ensnaring a Chicago Bull in a paternity suit. Once reluctantly back at school in the fall, she complains to an awestruck fellow teacher: “Did you know that all NBA players not only wear a condom, but then they take it with them?”
Plan C is to catch the eye of a naïve coworker with family money (singer Justin Timberlake) by spending $9,700 on breast implants. Timberlake makes a convincing rich dweeb in Bad Teacher. His best lines come when he sincerely rants on a field trip to Abe Lincoln’s log cabin about how much he hates slavery.
When Diaz learns that the teacher whose students get the highest test scores will earn a bonus, she actually starts to explain To Kill a Mockingbird to her class. She quickly realizes that it would be much smarter to just cheat, so she concocts an elaborate ruse to get a copy of the super-secret test ahead of time. (What’s funnier in real life is how shoddy the security is for most statewide “high-stakes” tests, yet teachers often can’t get their students to remember the answers they’ve stolen for them.)
Bad Teacher is an unsettlingly deadpan movie, directed by Jake Kasdan with a flat, alienating affect. There’s almost no musical score except for a few synthesizer notes. Perhaps that’s intended to recall Harold Faltermeyer’s famous scores for Beverly Hills Cop and Fletch at the mid-1980s peak of comedies with heroes who are sociopathic liars.
Diaz’s character is a remarkably un-seductive seductress, the opposite of Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She’s been a hot blonde for a quarter of a century, and by now she feels too entitled and bored to even try to ingratiate.
Eisenberg and Stupnitsky (The Office) also wrote the screenplay for the still unmade Ghostbusters III. Presumably, Bad Teacher is their female version of Bill Murray’s Dr. Peter Venkman: a lazy, fraudulent educator who is, somehow, also a natural leader of men. Diaz can’t quite pull that off, but I don’t know if any actress could.
I found Bad Teacher mostly hilarious. Then, again, I’m more into jokes about standardized testing than are most moviegoers.
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