The Kindergarten Teacher
In Sara Colangelo’s Sundance award-winner, she gives us an unnerving take on the mid-life crisis
Over the last decade, Maggie Gyllenhaal has carved herself quite the niche playing smart, capable, but deeply flawed women (if you haven’t seen BBC/HBO’s mini-series The Honourable Woman, you really should). Such roles are few and far between, so thank heavens for director Sara Colangelo, who uses the hell out of Gyllenhaal’s often inscrutable face, and then some, in beguiling drama The Kindergarden Teacher.
Gyllenhaal’s Mrs Spinelli (‘Lisa’ to her husband – and seemingly to no one else) teaches a kindergarten class, and does it well, pulling the children into her enthusiastic, giving orbit. Outside of school, she’s attending a weekly poetry group, and doing so with all the enthusiasm of one who feels they ought to be doing something high-minded and literary, but unable to do so without being thuddingly pedestrian. At home, her children are grown and have little use for her, and her husband seems bemused, but willing to let his wife process her dissatisfaction with life as she needs to. Then, one day after school, as her kindergarten student Jimmy (Parker Sevak) waits to be picked up, he haltingly mumbles out a poem of his own that suggests a hidden talent.
There’s a deep tension from early on, built up by Lisa’s just-off-kilter-enough responses to those around her, as she discusses Jimmy, her poetry, and her hopes for her children. Like the poetry we hear dissected – much of it Jimmy’s passed off as Lisa’s – there prove to be multiple ways to read it, some less charitable than others. Lisa is uncomfortably calm and logical, always ready with a practical reason for her less and less practical behaviour with Jimmy, suggesting someone teetering on a cliff edge, making this relatively simple drama a much tougher watch than you’d imagine.
Released 8 Mar by Thunderbird; certificate 12A