Review of Oleanna (1994) by Ben S — 01 Aug 2009

An experienced professor at an ivy league school violently grabs his young female student and smacks her hard across the face. She tries to escape, but he restrains her, delivering slap after slap, and a punch to the gut which sends her to the ground, weeping.

He's yelling profane insults at her the entire time as he picks up a chair, preparing to smash it to pieces over her cowering body... and the CROWD GOES WILD! But don't judge them until you see the film yourself.

I'm ashamed to admit I pumped a fist or two at the display, but that's only because that student was to my mind something close to the perfect distillation of evil, and one of the best on-screen villains I've ever seen, alongside Nurse Ratchett.

There's something going around about this play being a debate between two equally valid viewpoints, but I couldn't see that for the life of me. What surprised me is that the didactic battle that's waged on this quiet college campus bears such similarity to some kind of futuristic dystopian dictatorship, crushing freedom and ideas under the iron heel of conformity and bureaucracy.

The nature of the evil on display is malignant stupidity, an abject fear of thought and anger at those who promote it, and a desperate clinging to rules, facts and structures, those things which education should allow us to abandon.

It's cleverness without reason, quickness of thought without judgment. To me the film's power struggle was not over moral ground, because the villain abandoned morality when she lost her ability to choose for herself.

It's not even about the rape accusation, that's really just the last of many nails in the coffin, and garners undue attention. All I know is, Macy gets some heroic lines late in the film that made me want to cheer, I just somehow wish Mamet hadn't trapped me into rooting for a brutal, one-sided physical assault.

That's a neat trick.