Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is back in Utah covering the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, and the premieres are already flowing. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they are published, and check out our full archives of past editions.
When it comes to festival business matters, I really do my hardest to avoid talking about them in any review – it’s like Oscar prognostications, where you’re likely to be perpetually wrong and have your bad analysis preserved in an amber of Dunning-Kruger ignorance for all of your readers to revisit and scoff at – but it’s telling that I walked out of Christopher Zalla’s Radical thinking that I must have missed that Apple TV+ vanity logo at the top. See, Apple, with a few exceptions, has followed their stated ethos of green-lighting or acquiring projects that affirm a sense of Oprah-style morality to a T, especially when it comes to their prestige film projects (there’s a little more lee-way on the serialized side, but when Ted Lasso is your the jewel in your crown, you’re going to follow where that money leads). Importantly, I’d stress that this is not a dig at Radical, nor even a real shot at Apple, provided they continue, at the very least, ensuring they’re well-told and compelling. It’s those last two qualifiers that ultimately sum up why my thoughts went to Newtons and Pippins and U2-branded iPods. Radical is of the uplifting brand Sundance fare that has come to dominate the festival’s headliners, outside of the occasional controversy magnet, most of which are defined by their incredibly familiar-feeling content yet manage to be different enough in perspective to make it feel fresh – in this case, Dangerous Minds with a modern Mexican prestige cinema twist – and are, as such, popular with the crowds for often-justifiable reasons.
Radical is based on the true story of sixth-grade teacher Sergio Juarez (played here by Eugenio Derbez, last seen at the festival in… CODA) and portrays both his fascinating approach to teaching and the effects it had on the first generation of pupils who studied under him at the Jose Urbina Lopez Elementary School in Matamoros. Now, if I described to you many of his methods, I’m sure a few granola-eating Prius-driving readers (who I’m sure are wondering why I didn’t see the Indigo Girls movie last night) will recognize some of their hallmarks from Braden or Braiden or Brapple’s charter school or private Montessori program, but it’s important to note that Lopez Elementary is about as far away from those sorts of environments as one can get.
It’s a dead-end public school, beset by theft, violence, and local corruption, meant to serve as a rubber-stamp for the next generation of impoverished workers with primary school diplomas as proof that they have been educated, even if it hasn’t been a “satisfactory” one. It’s a place where your cars are searched for bombs, and gunfire erupts in the streets on the perimeter and where, indoors, the teachers dictate fractions and functions to children indifferent to whether or not they’re falling asleep because they know they’ll just be able to get the all-important standardized test they’re supposed to be preparing for in advance and be able to at least get the kids close to passing, lest they lose out on that coveted bonus. So when his class of sixth-graders – most of whom are the children of shift workers, with several exceptions, all of whom remain thoroughly uninterested in school – arrive on their very first day to find Sergio pleading with them to board the folding tables he’s laid out as makeshift lifeboats before they all drown (and subsequently pantomiming his own grizzly death), needless to say they’re pretty confused, as is the school’s director.
See, this is Sergio’s way of introducing the children to fractions and proportions: They have to figure out how many kids can go on the lifeboats in an even fashion, so that all of their weights will be supported, and those left out are the remainders. But that roundabout point is only arrived at a day or so later after the entire class has spent – genuinely curiously, I might add – trying to figure out the basics of flotation and buoyancy. Such is his approach to things, which he gleaned from a YouTube video after watching his original and more typical approach to education fail miserably at the middle school he used to work at: He lets the children lead, offering praise and suggestion as responses (he even encourages the class clown to “never change” his ways), with their natural inquisitiveness acting as his north star.
This has plenty of second-order effects: A young girl who is essentially acting as a surrogate parent for her younger siblings becomes interested in the works of John Stuart Mill and seeks them out at a local library, a shy yet incredibly bright girl whose educational pursuits are hampered by her poverty and her sickly scavenger father becomes convinced she can become an astronaut, and an orphan (the class clown referred to earlier), who means to leave school behind to join his elder brother’s gang in just a few short weeks, starts having second thoughts about his future. But though Sergio’s methods find support with the director, his fellow teachers – who don’t want him jeopardizing an easy payday – and the local government, which refuses to spare any additional baseline resources for the school, take a keen if darkened interest in exactly what Sergio is teaching his children, and ultimately the conflict comes down to whose pupils will do best on this silly standardized test.
Again, much of this is familiar to American audiences in form, though we’ve watched the films released within this subgenre slowly migrate away from “Maybe we should improve the public schools through better funding to help those committed teachers” to “Maybe those committed teachers are the only people who are gonna get those things done if the system won’t” to “Hey, best to probably pull our children out of public schools and enter lotteries so that we can avoid having to do genuinely difficult work to make things better and more equitable for all,” but the shift in setting helps to, at least within these borders, make Radical feel less like a pointed polemic and more like a genuine debate about the purpose of education in a child’s life. Is school simply something to be endured as a kind of rite of passage that doubles as free child care for the adults, or can it be something closer to its ideal: A place to provide children with basic knowledge and skills, but also the chance to imagine grander things beyond their circumstances and the resources to investigate their interests to their hearts’ content?
Folks can argue the merits of any sort of educational approach as presented here, but the one thing I think is brought into sharp relief is how oddly refreshing it is to see a caring teacher who also isn’t a disciplinarian asshole in practice and Derbez is a great choice for this role. His oftentimes manic energy and humor is put to swell use within these confines, as its easy to imagine him ceaselessly entertaining and engaging an entire classroom of children through his antics, but the sadder shades that emerge as the film progresses along are only enhanced by their contrast, as events occur which nearly wring the enthusiasm out of him.
This is where that all-important twist comes in: The setting is strikingly different from what we often experience within the confines of the studio system’s depictions of struggling students and failing schools. The abject desolation of those in Matamoros’ poorest districts – where gangs drag their victims through the craggy fields, and some of the students live out their days in ramshackle huts made of junk from the landfill next door – is so far removed from popular portrayals of American poverty that the notes Radical hits, though they may be very generic, feel more resonant. The keen sense of gloom and doom that awaits these kids in the future tempers the loftier ambitions of the film’s idealism. To Zalla’s credit, he refuses to fully commit to sappiness, even in his adaptation and fictionalization of events. There is no way that all of these students can be saved from their circumstances, nor is there a one-size-fits-all solution for each and every pupil, and that bleakness is captured in ways as somber and withering just as confidently Zella portrays, with wit and humor and joy, the sparks lit in these young minds slowly catching fire through care and encouragement.
Radical, again, is a creature of its genre, and one can occasionally feel the weight of the inspirational-cinema machine dragging it down and, importantly, out, given that this is a two-plus hour film, but as such, it manages to accomplish what few of its international siblings can actually do: inspire. And I would not be surprised in the slightest if it joins the likes of CODA in the winner’s circle in Park City or as a big-ticket item advertised on your set-up screens when you buy your next iPhone.