Review of Waiting for "Superman" (2010) by Shiira — 05 Nov 2010

The filmmaker got lucky, really, really lucky, when Nupur Lala, one of the eight kids Jeffrey Blitz selected to profile for his documentary about the annual pilgrimage to Washington D.C. that all spelling champions make, from all walks of life, including Lala, a Tampa, Florida native, actually won the 1999 Scripps-Howard Spelling Bee, providing "Spellbound" with a fortuitous climax which the filmmaker couldn't have scripted better himself.

It was a serendipitous outcome that gave the documentary an unexpected inspirational sports-movie sheen, and as a result, "Spellbound" did boffo business at the box office(for a non-fiction film), paving the way for Scott McGhee's "Bee Season" and Doug Atchison's "Akeelah & the Bee", all because The Tampa Times representative could spell "logorrhea" without a hitch.

No such luck for the man who helmed the Al Gore-love fest "An Inconvenient Truth"(a sort of "Waiting for Captain Ozone"), initially anyway, whose underprivileged young subjects(with one notable exception) are all losers(with the same notable exception) at their respective lotteries, denying "Waiting for Superman" the emotional uplift you get from a Hollywood ending.

It's a counterbalancing act that the film could have used to offset the dreary account of our malfunctioning public school system, if only for a little while. In this case, when real lives are on the line, happy endings are cathartic, not hokey.

One lucky child, just one, we ask, be granted the opportunity to rise above the scorched schoolyards, and one child does get lucky, does indeed get the opportunity to rise above, but it's the wrong child.

When Emily's number is called at her lottery station, we're happy for the middle-schooler; she looks thrilled, good for her, but it won't set off a chorus of cheers from moviegoers; no jubilant tears and no dancing in the aisles either, and that's because Emily is white, upper-class, and lives in a very affluent neighborhood.

The moviegoer likes an underdog. The golden ticket that grants a child entrance into Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory should go to somebody like Charlie Bucket, not Violet Beauegarde. Bianca is an underdog, and when her name goes uncalled, we can literally see the light go out of her eyes.

The Hispanic girl with the tiny voice understands all at once that she's been deprived of a golden ticket, and more likely than not, as a result of her bad draw, probably won't be going to the veterinarian school of her dreams.

That's quite a tough pill to swallow for someone so unformed. Is her life really over, as "Waiting for Superman" implicitly suggests? Despite given less to work with, the Esparza girl may prove to be the exception to the rule, but the hard numbers say otherwise, even if she overachieves at one of these so-called "drop-out factories", because the girl will be subjected to an inferior curriculum that won't fully prepare her for the dog-eat-dog world of university admissions, let alone, university itself.

But here's where things get truly alarming: to a lesser degree, the same reality applies to Emily if she goes to her preordained high school. The rich don't have the same problems as the poor, but they're problems, nevertheless.

Instead of Stanford or USC, Emily may end up at San Diego State or UC Santa Cruz. That's a compromise many people from disadvantaged backgrounds would take in a heartbeat, if you consider the option, shrewdly explicated in Keenan Ivory Wayans' "Dance Flick", when Thomas(Damon Wayans Jr.

) gets admitted to Just Community College. According to "Waiting for Superman", the crisis in education is no longer a problem unique to the other half; the crisis has reached epidemic proportions, escaping containment in the ghettos and spreading out to the gated communities, where pressing matters get noticed, hence the inclusion of Emily as a victim of the same system that previously afflicted only the minorities.

Get over yourselves. The educational quagmire created by the special interests of the teachers unions has left nothing but destruction in its wake, so there is no time to make this a black and white thing.

We're losing people. Wonder Woman(Michelle Rhee) has left the building. But there's still going to be short-sighted critics who'll have a problem with the filmmaker's agenda to place the haves and have-nots on the same side.

Lucky for him, Anthony, the D.C. youth who was placed on a waiting list(five names-deep), finally gets called by the prestigious boarding school, then makes a visit there, where he and claims his bunk in his dorm room, giving "Waiting for Superman", ironically, an ending similar to Lisa Cholodenko's "The Kids are Alright" when Joni says goodbye to the two moms.

You wonder about Laser and his best friend who tortures him. He's the sort of "American Idiot" that the doc makes a case against. Is Laser at a good school? They both go there.