Customer Reviews

Oleanna

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A previous reviewer called this film unnerving. Being a university professor, I can certainly attest that it touched a nerve. Oleanna is a fascinating character study that will almost certainly evoke powerful feelings in whoever watches it. After seeing it, I felt a lingering sense of unease that I couldn't quite explain. I thought about the film a long time before the reason dawned on me.

Oleanna is a story about a power play between two relatively unsympathetic characters: a pompous, complacent Professor and a dedicated, but dense, Student. At the start, the failing Student is seeking help from the seemingly indifferent Professor. As the plot slowly unfolds, we see that the Professor is not as uncaring as he initially appears. In fact, he delays a critical real estate deal to stay and counsel the student. Ironically, because of his compassion toward her, the advantage gradually shifts from the Professor to the Student. By the end of the story, it's shockingly clear how high the stakes really were--the power play has morphed into a death match.

Some reviewers have argued that each character's point of view has merit. For example, the Student has sacrificed & struggled to get to college, and is (rightly) angry that she if failing a course by a the Professor who holds higher education in utter contempt. That being said, the Student is clearly unable to grasp anything beyond a literal interpretation of what she reads, hears, or experiences. Because of this, it's painfully obvious that she doesn't belong in college. However, rather than hold her to a clear intellectual standard, the Professor tries to coddle and accomodate her. It is this misguided deed, combined with her literal & paranoid interpretation of his actions, that leads to the Professor's undoing.

In the aftermath of their initial meeting, the Student charges the Professor with sexual harrassment and abuse of power. In subsequent acts, the Professor tries to reason with her, which only makes matters worse. Ultimately, she convinces the all-powerful Tenure committee to embrace her version of the truth. Only in the final act is it revealed she may have been out to destroy the Professor from the start. In fact, there's a not so subtle hint that she thinks she's God. And why shouldn't she? By the end of the story she has managed to change the destiny of both the Professor and herself. So what is the moral of this story? It is, simply, that the educated will let the stupid inherit the Earth. What makes Oleanna particulary frightening is that this can, and does, happen every day.

As mentoined by others, this is not a film for the unprepared. Take Mamet's trademark choppy and rythmic prose - add that there are two characters in the whole film - put that together with the fact that the film is about one of the most controversial subjects and yet, does no 'moralizing' of the 'who's right' variety. What do you get? Boredom? Torture? That's what you'd think, right? Wrong! This film is outstanding; that is...if you are a David Mamet fan. I am, and quite frankly, if you're not, you should be.

Oleanna is the story of a girl who goes to see her college professor for help in a class she is failing. He means well (so it seems) and tries to help, but says (and does?) some thing that lead her to suspect sexual harrassment. Before long a complaint is filed and he may lose his tenure and his job. Yes, the whole film - THE WHOLE FILM - is dialogue between these two characters in his office (three acts). But as a testament to Mamet, no one has ever made a two-person dialogue stretched over 90 minutes so forward moving, exciting, confusing, nuanced, and awesome. The ending is explosive!

The reason for the knocked out star is for the Mamet-ness which, though I am accustomed to and love, may seem strange to the uninitiated. His style is this: the dialogue he writes containes fragmented and somewhat choppy sentences as an attempt to immitate real speech (why do movie characters always talk in complete sentences?). Further, instead of the actors improvising the "ums" and stammers, Mamet actually WRITES THEM INTO THE SCRIPT and the actor's job is to perform it completely as written! What does this make for? If done correctly and properly it makes for a highly rythmic and forward moving style. If done poorly, it makes for a mechanical and almost dull recetative that gets under your skin, it's so tight. Fortunately, it is done quite well by the two actors (with ever-so-slight slippage into the monotone from the actress).

All in all, this is a film I will watch again and again, and I'm confident that I'll see new nuances each time (that's just Mamet's way!). If you want to see some great art, get this film!

I have to agree with another reviewer regarding the tagline, ". . . whichever side you take, you're wrong." Well that's just not true. Any clear thinker can see the professor thinks he is interacting with a benign entity, a student who is floundering and needs his help. Unbeknownst to him, he is actually being visited by evil incarnate. Whichever side you take, you're either dead wrong or dead right.

Carol has struggled to get into college, and is now struggling to stay there at all. She is extremely frustrated. She is obviously her own worst critic, and as such is making college much more difficult than it needs to be by demanding that someone make her understand the material RIGHT NOW, and if a teacher is presenting material that is beyond her, it means she is stupid. Nobody likes feeling that. But in her mind, the teacher is actively saying that she is stupid, so she is going to make him pay. And she knows that she has no argument against him, so she does what any evil person would do: disregard the message, and destroy the messenger.

Carol is clearly a young, confused college student. Not uncommon. She has an IQ that obviously average. ("I don't understand." and "what does that mean?" about 400 times each). Common, by definition. She is naive to a degree that is disturbing. Not so common, which gives me some small amount of comfort, that people like this might be few and far between. These are her core flaws.

And then she hears her own teacher say that higher education might be a big swindle, might be a fake construct of a bygone age, might be of dubious use, and hardly anything more than a big game. The professor thinks that by making light of higher education, he might get her to stop being so tense, lighten up, and give herself a break. He deliberately provokes her in an attempt at a lively debate. He wants her to take the opposite position, argue for it, and perhaps win, all to get her to stop living in her notebook and to start THINKING.

Together, with her core flaws and the unsurprisingly low grade she has received, the result is not a flawed mind opening, but a towering rage -- a rage that badly distorts her view of the world. Her professor suddenly stops being someone who wants to help her, and morphs into: a sexist, a classist, an elitist, a patriarch, a rotten man who would use his sex, his position, his experience, his reputation, and his own "vile" belief systems to acquire power and exert it over everyone he can for his own gain. Her hatred is her rationale.

Great movie. Intense. Don't for a second believe that these two characters have opposite but equal arguments. Two arguments: one based on fact, motivated by a desire he help a student learn, the other based on a sick fantasy, motivated by a limitless desire to destroy the wrongly perceived source of a person's problems.

Mamet does it again. Whew.

This DVD version of the Mamet play has been reviewed by quite a few people in this forum. I just want to add one observation that moves away from the common perception that the play is simply about a mentally disturbed woman who employs feminist politics to presecute a college professor. That's true as far as it goes, but the play also seems to be about a college professor who digs his own grave by undermining the student's faith in the educational process and the institution that provides it. The student comes to the professor with a burning desire to learn, yet a marked inability to understand the terms in which knowledge is transmitted. The professor takes this as a legitimate criticism of traditional education, and an occasion to advance a highly idealistic view of education as the questioning of authority. Unfortunately, this is not what the student is looking for. She wants certainty, security, positive meaning, and the power that, in her mind, the possession of such knowledge confers upon the professor. She wants exactly that which the professor proceeds to denigrate. He overestimates her, which is to say that he utterly fails to understand her in her youthful confusion, yearning, and anxiety. Adrift, she finds the unambiguous truth she desires through her feminist "group", and uses this "knowledge" to turn the tables, to seize for herself the power she perceives the professor as having held over her. In so doing, of course, she destroys not only the professor, but any form of education that you or I would recognize as having value. This, then, might be seen as a comment on the politicization of the curriculum that began in higher education in the 1980s, of an advanced humanism sowing the seeds of its own destruction. The play seems to suggest that society at large cannot accommodate the insights of the humanist intellectuals, but survives on a simpler faith. Our professor destroyed that faith insofar as the student sought it in higher education, so she found it elsewhere. In a sense, his loss of nerve opens the floodgates. I think of Hitchcock's movie, "Rope", also about a professor the effect of whose words on a pair of students provides the "rope" with which he "hangs" himself, in a manner of speaking (the professor in that movie isn't the victim, but he is brought face-to-face with the consequences of his own superficial nihilism. I'm not equating the Macy character's humanism with nihilism, just noting a similarity between the ironic structure of the two films).
Anyway, the Mamet film is a good one to spark excited discussion among students. I recommend it.

Sure, on the surface this seems like a movie/play about sexual harrassment, but it is truly deeper and more terrifying than that. I believe what this story is about is modern man's inability to conduct civil discourse, and of our propensity to run roughshod over our fellow citizens just to prove that we can. The professor and the student in this story are both extremely flawed in their own ways, but in common they are both terrible at simple human communication. As a result, a very minor event gets blown WAY out of proportion, and neither character has the foresight to see how badly things may well turn out as a result - at least until it's too late. This is actually a very sharp microcosm of America's litigous society. We seek to sue rather than to compromise or understand. It's not enough to be right - everyone else has to be wrong. This story is as good an example as anything else I've encountered of why our society is going to hell in a handbasket. We as a society are so full of hatred, self-loathing, insecurity, and/or pomposity that we are hastening our own cultural demise. The tag line for this movie (and the play) is "Whatever side you take, you're wrong." How right that is! There is no right side or wrong side. That is not the point anyway. The point is, look at the kinds of problems we create for ourselves in this society. It is truly scary how much real life is mirrored in this story.

It's always been a puzzle to me why some screen adaptations of stage plays work just fine and others fail miserably. Lately, I've been watching a fair number of them--not for the sole purpose of answering that question, mind you: it just seems to have worked out that way. Good thing, too, that I haven't been hellbent on resolving that issue, because I'm no closer to an answer now than I've ever been.

Sure you can talk about how successfully the play has been "opened up" for the screen. In the case of OLEANNA, the answer would be "not very much at all." It is, as others have noted, still very much stagebound. Like the female student, we feel virtually confined to the professor's office. Theatergoers have to accept such conventions as a (usually) necessary theatrical limitation. But in the context of a film, it becomes almost unbearably claustrophobic.

And I see from reading other reviewers' comments, that I'm hardly alone in finding the dialog too mannered. For long stretches at a time, the two protagonists (well, actually, antagonists) do nothing by interrupt each other. Some interruption makes for a more natural representation of actual conversation, but when neither character actually gets to complete an entire sentence, it is anything but natural. It's just irritating. Mamet, who reportedly writes to a metronome, should probably have turned the darn thing off this time out.

And of course there's that constantly ringing telephone. That would likely have driven me nuts even as a theatrical device. On film it's too much.

Mamet is always interesting enough to make almost any of his projects worth watching (at least once). And William H. Macy is his reliably quirky self. The quintessential character actor, he shines when given the lead role. Despite the mannered dialog, he is able to plumb his character's proverbial depths and create a fascinating portrait of a tortured academic, whose ambition, though very real, is hampered by nagging self-doubt (to say nothing of his doubts regarding his chosen profession).

Debra Eisenstadt as his student antagonist doesn't have as rich a palette to work with. Her character goes from insecure, diffident student, somewhat in awe of her brilliant professor, to near militant, bent on the personal destruction of her former instructor. The actual transition seems to have been made deliberately vague. She seems to have fallen under the influence of an unidentified but apparently quite militant "group" and finds some new strength and a sense of identity therein. With a moral certitude unique to the very young, she has no qualms about sacrificing her professor's life and career on the altar of "political correctness."

Which brings up the subject of the film's "message." The film's tagline is "Whatever side you take, you're wrong." And that simply is not true. As riddled with self-doubt as the professor is, he is clearly the more sympathetic character. Yes, both "sides" are aired, but it is clear almost as soon as the nature of the conflict is articulated, that the tortured but intellectually honest professor doesn't stand a chance against the newfound black-and-white worldview of the "true believer" student.

All of this conflict could have made for gripping cinema. What you actually are likely to come away with is that "hmmm-it-probably-worked-onstage" feeling. And that's too bad. Given the potentially incendiary subject matter, it really should have been a better film.

David Mamet, the Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning author of the Broadway and later cinematic masterpiece, Glengarry Glen Ross, and other works, wrote and directed this artistic and quasi-realistic look at the gender wars. It starts out so slow that I almost gave up on it in the middle of the second reel (or actually in the middle of what would be the second act-it's adapted from his play) but I am surely glad I held on as it gathered momentum and power. It's about a college professor and a student who accuses him of sexual harassment. He's weak willed and likes his position and she's a ball-breaker who projects her desire for him by attacking him. He doesn't see the danger until it's too late.

William H. Macy, lately seen as the fifties TV husband in Pleasantville (1998) and before that as the murderous car salesman in Fargo (1996), plays the pompous professor while Debra Eisenstadt is the unpleasant student looking to hurt. The dialogue is repetitious and purposely banal in an attempt to imitate actual speech. If you've never seen or read a Mamet play, his unique and highly characteristic style may startle you. What he tries to do with the repetition and the indirection is to imitate and burlesque the manner of normal speech. He effort is less successful here, in fact annoying at times, partly because Macy's unique acting style is almost a natural parody of misdirection and obtuseness. Taken together perhaps we have overkill. Nonetheless, this is fascinating to watch. People do talk at cross purposes and practice miss-communication. The tension, once developed, is maintained throughout because we can't decide whose side we're on. Both characters are purposely unsympathetic, and both compromised because of their personality weaknesses.

Mamet is a master at exposing human hypocrisy and ulterior motivation. We can see that the professor is in fact innocent of sexual harassment, but entirely guilty in his heart, while the unattractive girl although lying and out to hurt has been devalued by our society to the point of self hatred. They are unsympathetic, yet we can, through them, if we are honest with ourselves, catch a glimpse of our own compromised nature. They are out to abuse or hurt one another because of established character defects. The lecher leches to control and to prove his masculinity, while the harassed "victim" seeks some attention to spice up her dreary life.

"Whatever side you take you are wrong." This is the tagline for David Mamet's "Oleanna" So I was expecting to not be able to decide who's side I was on. Along with that I was also expecting Mamet to effectively nurture my confusion. Doing so in his trademark "trickster" style. First having a character give his side of the story and then the other one give hers and as they argue, the audience should have seen very valid points from both sides. Thus making it impossible to fully condemn either character. If this had happened the tagline would have been true, and I would have given this film five stars. Nothing even remotely close to that happened. Macy was beaten at his own game yes but he was beaten unfairly. He was innocent of the charges, and she knew it. She just out-talked him and used his personality against him. The fact remains that all he was trying to do was help her. He was willing to make sacrifices so that a student could succeed in his class. She used that against him as well. She couldn't figure the material out so she instead figured him out. She effectively destroyed him. Now I am aware that this is probably the exact opposite of what Mamet intended. Mamet was alarmed that the audience cheered when Macy hit her. Yet I did too. She wanted nothing more than to ruin him and she did.

I titled my review as above only to distinguish the fact I am in no way an intellectual. This was unnecessary of course for anyone who had read any of my previous reviews. Not much insight, little education, but rich in opinion.

For this three-act play by David Mamet transformed to film by Mamet I offer my movie-buff-opinions on three facets of the movie version of 'Oleanna' and include a personal insight I question.

Mamet, having penned the tale, was the obvious choice as a director. We know of course he must have attained what he desired. Unfortunately, as film fans many viewers migh possibly be more receptive to Mamet's attempts to portray 'real-life communication' if he had allowed actor's to deliver his beloved interruptions as just that - interruptions. In everyday conversation when people interrupt and talk over one another there are no 'silences' between the words we interrupt. Our conversations explode into one long flow of dialogue. Multiple words of one participant are overlapped and drowned out by the other speaker's interrupting words. Most of us recognize it because we nearly all do it - often. Mamet's attempt felt annoying to me because the effort for realism (the interruptions) was interrupted itself by the silences he directed into the script. But hey, he is the author, the director, the expert. I am just a talker who gets interrupted often, rightly so most of the time. He did get one interruption accurate, that darn telephone. It was as real on film as in our lives and I yearned for Macy's character to just unplug the thing!

Acting ability is so easily recognized when there are only two characters for comparison and an extremely challenging script as a common opponent. The so often undertreated, extremely talented William Macy is hands-down the superior thespian in this match. His ability to strictly conform to Mamet's restrictive formula and still manage to give definition, life, emotion, and humanity to the professor unfortunately served to spotlight the lesser acting talent of Debra Eisenstadt in her role of Carol, the student. Eisenstadt's delivery of Mamet's stilted words were particularly irritating in the first act (I personally yearned to smack her); perhaps the major reason some reviewers only made it through a small portion of the film before throwing in the towel. An unfortunate decision on their part leading to their being cheated of the heart of the argument ultimately unfolding on screen.

"whichever side you take, you're wrong", the tag line for this film is interesting in that while the story is guaranteed to make the viewer 'think' about the opposing sides, we seem to 'remain' on the same side at that end as we were at the beginning. Throughout the previous reviews, the reader could easily discern the 'professor' from the 'student' by the content of the review itself without the inclusion of the statement of the obvious 'as a professor/teacher' or 'I am a student'. Our predilection for 'pulling for' or 'mentally defending' our own stance throughout the film no doubt makes 'Oleanna' much more interesting and personal for each viewer. While the unfolding of events exposes the pros and cons of the beliefs of each stringently drawn stereotypical character, viewers seem to ultimately discover their urge to mentally enter the fray and root for 'their' side.

It goes without saying, given this being the work of David Mamet, this is not an action-packed shoot-em up, techno-rich experience. There is a reason however why some reviewers alluded to being drained and tired at the end of this film. It encompasses the viewer in a mental wresting match that invigorates the thought processes of the viewer to such a degree that we are challenged to participate, encouraged to interrupt with our own thoughts and ideas, and just as frustrated at the interruptions to our participation as the characters on screen. I highly recommend this film to anyone loving a good argument. No, it isn't 'Inherit the Wind' or even the more personal 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf'. It is however a debate on higher education, women's rights, personal ambition, and communication in today's world without many of those specific 'words' being spoken. No blatant bandstanding, no catch phrases. Just two people engaged in a personal interchange on many of today's hottest topics which involves the viewer to a degree that we recognize the battle, pick our side, and pull for all we are worth, often finding personal kernels of thought just for ourselves.

Possible spoilers if you haven't yet seen the film. You might consider stopping here and coming back to read later.

My questionable personal insight? Having read the previous reviews, it struck me I read a lot into this play that apparently wasn't there. As the events unfolded I deducted that Carol's group was 'women' in generally, not a specifically formed social group. Also, I felt that the entire first act and specifically her personal actions were an act on her part. As Carol revealed herself a more vocal, less confused and more specifically directed person, I felt that the professor had deliberately been 'set-up' from the git-go. She had a plan and knowing his personality she had designed that plan feeling confident he would 'fall right into' her contrivance. The hanging around, refusing to leave, writing it all down such didn't seem 'normal' and 'natural' for the character she was vocalizing. But, it is pretty clear I am in a minority of one on this, based on the other reviews. That fact however is the down-fall of watching films alone and the beauty of a thought-provoking film, it gets your gray-cells marching and allows them to explore in all sorts of directions.

A professor about to get tenure has a run in with a student who resents his condescension and mis-interprets his efforts to help her, all of which leads to emotional and practical complications. A believable set of twists and turns will have you squirming and wanting to interrupt to straighten out these two ernest but headstrong individuals from their collision course. This is a classic that all people in education should see, if for no other reason than it shold scare the pants off of them.