“But only in their dreams can men be truly free. ‘Twas always thus, and always thus will be.”
“Tennyson?”
“No, Keating.”

“DEAD POETS SOCIETY.” It might have been a dystopian nightmare about a world controlled by exterminationist versophobes. Instead it’s a movie about a boys’ prep school in 1950s New England, and about a teacher, named (none too subtly) John Keating, who employs poetry and (mostly) the power of personality to rouse his students from their pre-programmed sleepwalks into lives designed for rather than by them. One of the most fondly remembered films of Robin Williams‘ long and protean career, DEAD POETS SOCIETY is a moving, maddening, manic yet maudlin testament to, above all, the indispensability of great teaching.

Director Peter Weir is no stranger to unisex private schools. His first major success, and an ongoing cult/midnight favorite, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975) concerns an all-girls school in Weir’s native Australia circa 1900, and the disappearance into apparent thin air of a few students during a field trip into the countryside. Repressive pedagogic and parental regimes predicated upon reverence for tradition and discipline hold sway at both schools. The prospects for rebellion are slim, and the only way out can appear to be, well — final. “I’m trapped!” says Neil, a gifted actor bullied by his father into pursuing a career in medicine.” “No, you’re not,” Keating tells him. The film itself is ultimately inconclusive on this point. To its credit.

Moving laterally from death to poetry: DEAD POETS SOCIETY has its detractors, and it may well deserve them. What Keating instills in his worshipful students isn’t so much a love or appreciation of poetry, but rather a restless, romantic, ravening hunger for experience — “gotta do more, gotta be more” chants Charlie (damn it, call him Nuwanda) in between blurts of saxophone at one of the Society’s meetings — along with a self-aggrandizing drive to create the kind of larger-than-life personality that Keating ascribes to Whitman and Byron, and which his students ascribe to Keating.

I don’t recall if I felt this way when I was 18 (probably not), but the first half of DEAD POETS SOCIETY strikes me now as relentlessly, even exhaustingly persistent in its attempt to inspire us. “Carpe that diem, boys!” we are constantly being told, “them rosebuds ain’t gonna gather themselves!” Something like adrenal fatigue sets in after a while. The melancholy reflection that Robin Williams’ early career was “fueled” by a raging cocaine habit may temper one’s enthusiasm for a vision of the artist’s — or of the person’s — vocation that is centered on speed, desire, and the incandescent self.

But the film largely redeems itself from such reservations by frankly incorporating a great deal of melancholy itself. We are food for the worms, after all, and anyway, what kind of day is it that Mr. Keating has seized for himself? How successful a life? Is his public persona a smokescreen veiling frustrated ambitions and a thwarted personal life? Williams’ finely modulated performance conveys these complexities of character in the film’s quieter moments. As fellow Hassler Oscar Goff suggested yesterday, Williams was always performing the role of “Robin Williams” irrespective of whatever role he was ostensibly cast in(POPEYE (1980) excepted), and nowhere is this truer than it is here: Keating’s mania imperfectly conceals a stoically borne sadness that, for Williams, finally proved unbearable.

Whatever its virtues, or lack thereof, as a pedagogical aid to English teachers or an advertisement for poetry, DEAD POETS SOCIETY gains narrative gravity as it gathers rosebuds, and well before film’s end we find ourselves caring deeply for these kids, suspended as they are between parental and societal expectations and the shadow-haunted promise of Robin Williams’ radiant face. So hightail it to The Brattle tonight and suck yourself some marrow out of life. No one else can do it for you.

9/24 // 7pm
128 minutes
$10 General Admission // $8 Students w/ID // $7 Seniors & Children

Brattle Theatre
40 Brattle St.
Cambridge, MA
02138