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This "To Ma'am with Love" is much more an escapist popcorn movie than the inner-city document its marketing suggested. Michelle Pfeiffer plays real-life former Marine Louanne Johnson, a high school English teacher who meets resistance from kids and administration alike at a tough urban school in Northern California. Pfeiffer is good, and her character's overall development even survives various post-production story cuts. (A romance with Andy Garcia's character was completely eliminated before release; Garcia is nowhere in sight.) The actors who play Johnson's students are also fine, and the whole film becomes the latest in a long tradition of sentimental movies about teachers who change the lives of kids.
--Tom Keogh
LouAnne Johnson (Michelle Pfeiffer), a divorced ex-Marine, teaches English in an urban Northern California high school, and her students are an unruly, education-resistant bunch-that is, a typical supporting cast for the heroic-teacher genre. Thanks to Pfeiffer's inventive acting, John N. Smith's movie does a fairly entertaining job of capturing the unscrupulous, guerrilla-like cunning of a good teacher in a bad school. But the cut-to-the-enlightenment dramaturgy of Ronald Bass's screenplay feels desperate and false. And in the final scenes the movie gets as sticky as "To Sir with Love." It canonizes the heroine needlessly: Pfeiffer looks plenty good without a halo. Also with George Dzundza and Courtney B. Vance. Based on Johnson's memoir, "My Posse Don't Do Homework." -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
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