The transfer from stage to film doesn’t always go smoothly, as it’s hard to shake the film’s theater roots. The film offers witty but unbelievable dialogue for an eighteen-year-old; but it admirably gives voice to rally around the flag of imagination to inspire the student body instead of being mired in traditional rigidity and dullness. Yet the broad comedy never is funny and its crafty attempt at wordplay seems self-defeating when the featured students are not really sympathetic figures, as they cram to get into the elite schools of Oxford and Cambridge. The group of eight are so impudent and most seem like soulless show-off brainy types, that I never took an interest in their ambitious struggle especially when they never really had much to say that didn’t seem thin.

Two different styled teachers–the aging, obese, gay, motorcycle riding, romantic, unorthodox French and literature teacher Mr. Hector (Richard Griffiths) and the pragmatic, cynical and nerdy younger recent Oxford grad temp teacher Mr. Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore) who has been brought in to teach how to pass the entrance exam, vie for the affections of the students. Hector speaks for poetry, movies, pop culture and learning for its own sake, while smarty-pants Irwin speaks for career opportunities, boldness and beating the college game by being cunning and opportunistic and knowing how to put on a good performance. They each make good points and the students give them both their full attention. Though Hector gropes the students and is sometimes misunderstood, he gives his all in teaching and years later he’s the “real” teacher students will fondly remember for inspiring them. This comes out when the third teacher who inspired the boys, the dedicated droll-humored, no-nonsense, master history teacher, Mrs. Dorothy Lintott (Frances de la Tour), relates at the film’s last scene what happened in later years to the boys.