Review: Bad Education (2019)
Bad Education (2019)
Directed by Cory Finley
It was just a few days ago that I said that the actress Geraldine Viswanathan “was everywhere in 2023,” including in the recently-released movie I was reviewing, “Drive-Away Dolls.” Well, in today’s film, 2019’s “Bad Education” — an HBO production now available to stream on Max — here she is again, playing a high school journalist who is apparently so unpopular at school that she can spend an entire year on an investigative project. And boy, does her project blow up.
At the beginning of this movie blog last summer, I was looking with Eileen Tull and others at films of 1976, and they included the daddy of investigative journalism movies “All the President’s Men,” with its famous overhead shot of Woodward and Bernstein in the Library of Congress, going through receipts and lists of phone numbers and so on. “Bad Education” has its own little visual homage to this moment. It’s like a signpost telling viewers they’re on the right path.
But this isn’t a movie about the student journalist Rachel played by Viswanathan. It’s about a public schools superintendent, Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman), his director of finance Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney), and several members of their staff and families. It’s all based on a 2004 New York Magazine article by Robert Kolker about just such a crime that took place in the post Long Island suburb of Roslyn. For decades, the two perpetuated a huge project of embezzlement and fraud against their employers — which is to say, against the taxpayers.
As shown in the film, Roslyn is, if not the place where Tony Soprano lives, the even nicer suburb where he wishes he could live. The town has great public schools, which turns out to be entirely the point of living there. Not the quaint colonial downtown, not the attractive houses on large wooded lots. It all comes down — and when I say “it all,” the film makes clear that this includes not just the reputation of the school district and its leaders, but also of the town and, crucially, real estate values — to where the school system stands in getting its graduates into Ivy League colleges.
The film begins with an auditorium full of cheering people celebrating the school reaching 4th best in… is it the nation? Maybe just New York state. In any case, it’s this metric that matters to Superintendent Tassone and his stakeholders the townspeople. And the story is about Tassone protecting his quest to get the school to #1 — and his lucrative job and its, uh, side benefits — by any means necessary.
Now, most of your enjoyment of the film will come from the performances of Jackman and Janney. Everybody knows Allison Janney is a terrific comic actor, and as she settles in to middle aged roles — and this is a peach of a female role, as it’s not focused on a romance but on her position as the school district’s business manager and work-wife of Tassone — she shows some real range. At home she’s the strong one in her family, where everyone bewares her squint.
Jackman, as the vain and venal school boss, operates on a different level. For half the film, he’s the good guy and we’re impressed by and rooting for his character. A scene at a Las Vegas hotel — he’s there for an industry conference, natch — reveals that’s he’s gay, but director Cory Finley and writer Mike Makowsky pace the scene beautifully, giving it time to develop not only between the characters but in the minds of the audience. I thought of the scene in Todd Haynes’ “Far from Heaven” (2002) where Dennis Quaid has a similar scene, and if anything this scene in “Bad Education” is better.
(Speaking of Haynes, Janney’s performance in “Bad Education” is so enjoyable that I wondered how she might have essayed the Julianne Moore role in last year’s “May December,” also directed by Haynes.)
Screenwriter Mike Makowsky, coincidentally or not, was an 8th grader in Roslyn1 when the scandal broke in 2002. He has few credits to his name, and I wonder if this script was a personal project for him, something that stuck inside him as a great story and was developed over years. An interview with him doesn’t really say. In any case, the script is very well constructed. It has to do a difficult thing halfway through, which is to take Superintendent Tassone, the good guy we’ve been rooting for, and with whom we have even more sympathy after the gay scene, and turn him into the film’s villain. That we never quite lose our sympathy for him is a testament to the skill of Makowsky and Finley and the editors.
Because once we realize that Tassone is the bad guy of the story, his character becomes even more interesting. He’s presented as a complex character with many layers. One reason it’s challenging for Jackman is that Tassone had multiple face lifts, so Jackman has to act through all this makeup and prosthetics that show the results of this surgery.2 Whenever an actor has to work in lots of makeup and costuming, part of their face — one of their primary instruments as a screen actor — is hidden, so they have to use voice and body language and timing to convey thoughts and emotions their face can’t. In my opinion, Jackman doesn’t quite pull it off, but it’s still fascinating to watch his character’s carefully constructed multiple selves and the worlds he built for them to inhabit collapse.
Tassone is a fascinating character for a unique reason. Yes, at base he is a serial liar and a thief on a significant scale (nothing like Bernie Madoff, surely, but certainly significant for a small-town embezzler). But he is also excellent at being a school administrator. It took years for the real Tassone to build his reputation in the community and the school system’s reputation nationally, and he was good at all the different parts of his job that went into doing that. Not just for a few years, but for over a decade. You can see that Tassone likes being good at his job — his performance justifies not only his high salary but also, in terms of character motivation, he uses his real achievements as self-justification for his crimes.
It’s at this point that Rachel, the student journalist, becomes important to the story. At the beginning of the film, she goes to Tassone for a quote for a story she’s doing on a capital improvement project Tassone’s been pushing. (This project, a “skyway” from one side of the campus to the other, is sort of the film’s MacGuffin, the plot justification for the characters’ actions. It’s great that we never see renderings of what this skyway is supposed to look like; it’s very much pie in the sky.) She dismissively refers to her story as a “puff piece,” and Tassone, in his encouraging-teacher mode, gently scolds her: “It doesn’t have to be a ‘puff piece,’ Rachel. The story can be what you make it.”
She takes this encouragement and runs with it, spending the rest of the school year working on the investigation that brings everything crashing down. Tassone thus plants the seeds of his own destruction. I told you it was a well-constructed script.
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a32291684/bad-education-hbo-true-story-frank-tassone-pamela-gluckin/
One of my favorite lines in the original New York magazine story is “Parents and teachers couldn’t fail to notice long light scars behind his ears. A few years into his tenure, he showed up to a parents’ meeting with small bruises around both eyes. He said he had been boxing, but people in Roslyn know an eye tuck when they see one.”