6 reviews

Seven clever boys working for the Oxford entrance exam in a Grammar School in Sheffield, two masters - one a formulaic young Thatcherite, the other an old school all-rounder - a born-again Christian PE teacher, a chain-smoking female rough diamond and a stereotypical bully of a headmaster....

Add in sex, religion, some sparkling dialogue, and you have Alan Bennett's latest play, now a film.

The acting is brilliant without exception, the story moving, and the funny bits very, very funny.

It may be a generation thing, but we found the boys unrealistically at home with their sexuality - there was no edge of nervous tension to the jokes, which we children of the fifties might have expected.
What generated nervous tension for me was the Oxford interviews - clearly these have NOT changed in thirty years!

I came away thinking that I would actually love to see it as a play. This is a film of a play, rather than a film in its own right. The final scenes in particular seemed to me to require to be physically present with what was going on to be really effective. Nevertheless - a highly enjoyable evening.

Jessica Osborne 13 Oct 2006

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George Sawer October 15, 2006

Working together for the first time in twelve years (their last collaboration was 1994’s The Madness of King George), director Nicholas Hytner and writer Alan Bennett have re-united to produce another adaptation of an original stage play by the latter. The result is The History Boys, a muddled but enjoyable film that seems to belong more to 80s era Play for Today than 21st century cinema.

The film is set in Sheffield at the beginning of the 1980s, and is about five post A-level teenagers from a boy’s grammar school preparing for their entrance exam to Oxford. The story is rolled along by a series of narrative vignettes (all involving the boys and their teachers), from young Oxford graduate Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore) recruited to whip the boys into shape, to the confused and lonely elderly teacher (Richard Griffiths) who is stuck teaching them French and General Studies, to one of the few female members of staff in the school, who has spent her entire career teaching what she calls “a lifetime's worth of male mistakes”.

Thematically, The History Boys is a funny melange of ideas: education (and the different ways of approaching and interpreting it), teenage life, confused sexuality, unrequited love, loneliness in later life and feminism (briefly) are all touched upon by Bennett’s script, but the writer never seems certain where his opinions on these matter lie. This might be a consequence of his writing about things that he remembers from his youth, and perhaps has never come to fully understand, but at the end of the film I felt myself struggling to see what he was trying to get at.

That said, there is much to admire in the film, such as Richard Griffiths' emotional meltdown (startlingly moving), Frances De La Tour’s feminist diatribe (all the more surprising for coming totally from left-field), the unrequited love that Posner has for Dakin, the flummoxing way that Dakin plays with Irwin, and several shared cigarette moments all make for a constant stream of solid, engaging scenes. The performances are uniformly convincing and sympathetic: Campbell Moore gives a nicely judged performance as Irwin, which stands him in good stead in the company of the more established Griffiths and De La Tour. And technically the film, while never rising from the traps of its small screen aesthetic, is very competent: although the script retains the exceedingly theatrical nature of the original, Hytner’s camerawork never made me feel trapped inside what could have been the constrictions of a “filmed play”.

The overall problem with The History Boys is lack of direction, but I forgive it that for its enjoyable, if not entirely conclusive, exploration of the various small tales that form its whole. It also has a great soundtrack: New Order, The Smiths, The Cure, The Clash and Aztec Camera all provide the backdrop for various pivotal scenes, and anyone who remembers the 1980s, even if their lives were worlds apart from those of these kids, is likely to appreciate this, especially the foot-tap-inducing use of “This Charming Man” over the opening credits.

There isn't a play in my opinion that can match the crude homo-erotic humour of a Sheffield grammar school. The History Boys is a triumph combining a stellar cast with knockout timing and punchy dialogue which will leave you rolling in the aisles.

The film is good but I prefer the stage version as you get the feeling you are experiencing it with them, and it's more real, with everchanging inflection and intonation every time.

EFiltness 22 Jan 2008

As someone who has not seen the stage play I was drawn towards the filmed version of The History Boys by the various positive reviews liberally spread throughout the bias British press. What I got was a thoroughly unrealistic and slow paced experience that failed to leave the insprational feel good after-taste that was its obvious intention.

The six formers, on whom the plot revolved, looked and acted so much older than their tender years it made suspension of disbelief all but impossible. Their apparent acceptance of their 'inspirational' teacher's fumblings as well as their breathtaking lack of angst around their own ambigious sexuality did not ring true - no matter how intelligent they were meant to be. In fact The History Boys made the worse mistake that a film can. It failed to make one care about the protaganists.

Much was hyped about the screenplay but its structure was poor. One was constantly subjected to overlong passages of dialogue that were not as clever, profound or insightful as Bennet intended - not through the unforgiving lens of feature film anyway. The direction also lacked quality - one never felt like one was watching a film in the cinematic sense of the word.

On the positive side it was well acted. However, the best acting in the world cannot rescue a basically flawed concept as The History Boys clearly illustrated.

All in all this was an excruitiatingly slow car crash of a 'movie'. I can only imagine that the play is so much better which, quite frankly, would not be hard. 0/5.

Cult 12 Nov 2006

There is a lot of tiresome cultural one-upmanship surrounding The History Boys, along the lines of ‘I saw the play’s first night at the National, at Nick Hytner’s invitation, and it was SO much better, etc’. OK, so it’s a filmed play, but when did you last see a film with a script this good? It didn’t need to be ‘cinematic’: if the film’s mission was to bring a great piece of entertainment to an audience of millions who would never see it in a theatre, as it surely was, then job done. There is gaucheness and intellectual snobbery in Bennett’s writing, but it’s more than overcome by the fantastic dialogue and by scenes that are worth the price of admission alone (the French class, Brief Encounter, Drummer Hodge…). Highly recommended.

Young Offender 25 Oct 2006

A highly frustrating film, which I nearly walked out of half way through. A definite cure for insomnia, this film was clearly backed financially by the wrong people. It was like watching a play on screen and did not take advantage of the medium of cinema in any way. Yet again, homosexuals were portrayed as being either fat, frivolous, freaks or just plain frisky: a portrayal of which I'm quite frankly bored of seeing in mainstream cinema and that is no more realistic than plain insulting to gay people.

The casting was also pretty bad.. half the 'boys' looked like they were at least 35. I'm sure there are plenty more interesting and exciting independent films made by Brits that are worth parting with £6.50 to see. The worst film I've seen in a long time, I'm afraid and one which left me more annoyed than educated or entertained.

Ruby Wright 22 Oct 2006