Dead Poets Society

Of the many gaps in my movie knowledge, Dead Poets Society was perhaps a significant one, but not because it is considered a great movie (it received no votes in the Sight and Sound poll). It’s a film instead that had and still has a profound impact on my generation. It came out just as I was starting in secondary school myself, and there are a few parallels to my own experiences (albeit this film is in fact set in 1959). I had seen parts of it, and knew a great deal more about it from the many secondary references that exist in other films, TV shows etc. It was, as they say, not a movie but an experience, seeming to summarise the feelings of a generation. The performance of Robin Williams and the appearance of several teenage stars (Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard) no doubt helped to make it popular. Undoubtedly it is deeply moving, and you’d have a heart of stone not to feel some emotion at the ending – even if it’s fairly manipulative. The film as a whole, though, speeds rapidly along, and only gives us a glimpse of the story that we are watching. It is, after all, adapted from a novel. We seem to skip much that is of importance – his audition and rehearsals, for one. The society of the title actually plays only a small part in the film. There is also little real motivation for the action of the ending. We get the sense of something richer, but don’t experience it. The direction of Peter Weir is good, as always, but the philosophy that Williams promotes is fairly simplistic, as is the attitude to poetry – dominated by American and in particular Beat generation poets. We feel such a strong connection to the 1950s because the issue of over-protective, traditional parents and a repressive society that an individual struggles against is something that, whilst prominent then, stays with us always. It is this, despite everything else that the film provides, that is the main pull and message of the movie.