The Kindergarten Teacher (2018): The Blurred Line Between Mentorship and Exploitation
Image Credits: Neil Grabowsky via WIkimedia Commons
Many of us crave – or are perhaps directed towards – stability. Conventional and monotonous, yes, but it equally brings a sense of comfort and security. Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal) leads a life of conventional suburbia in Staten Island, but it doesn’t satisfy her. Is Lisa grappling with the belief that she was destined for more, or does her restlessness stem from a feeling that we are all, collectively, on the precipice of cultural decay? Perhaps an intertwinement of both. Connection and stimulation, unavailable within her home, are uncovered inside her evening poetry classes: a thing of relic in a world that prioritises materialism.
The problem for Lisa, however, is that her writing is deemed derivative by the class’s teacher Simon (Gael García Bernal). A person trying to create from a place of inauthenticity; replicating what she believes “art” should look like, reflecting the external whilst offering no interiority. Is she destined to play the role of appreciator rather than artist?
But her poetry isn’t “bad”, which renders the acclaim Lisa eventually comes to receive slightly ironic. By presenting the poems of Jimmy (Parker Sevak), one of her kindergarten pupils with seemingly innate poetic talent, as her own, Lisa finally earns the attention and praise of Simon.
Yet she encourages Jimmy to display his own art, ultimately revealing him as the true author of the poem ‘Anna’, which he reads to tempered applause. The reaction this time feels steeped in politeness. The same poem that had been greeted with enthusiasm from Simon – interpreting it to represent a woman’s unmooring in a homosexual entanglement – is revealed to be the product of Jimmy’s innocent fixation upon his kindergarten helper. Perhaps this change in reception exposes the occasional falsity of literary circles, and the underlying irony of art criticism. What had seemed a deliberate and subversive simplicity in Lisa’s work, now reads as the natural limitations of a five-year-old’s literary talent.
Children are often rewarded when surmounting their age, their precociousness treated as a sign of prodigy. In this sense, the inverse holds true for Lisa. It isn’t just the literary circle who meet Jimmy’s poetry with kind disinterest. His father and babysitter, too, seem bewildered by Lisa’s attention to him. In the closing moments, when Jimmy tells an adult outside Lisa that he has a poem, he finds, this time, no willing ear to listen.
Based on Nadav Lapid’s 2014 film of the same name, Colangelo’s version not only reshapes the socio-economic environment, but introduces a racial dynamic. It’s difficult not to question whether Lisa would feel so emboldened to violate the boundaries she does if Jimmy were white. Her conviction that she alone knows what is best for him risks a sense of ownership, a tension made all the more uneasy given the racial context. Colangelo offers no overt answers, but the optics of the relationship make it difficult to ignore.
Amidst an education system focused on the machinery of results, in place of individuality and expression, Lisa is the one person who recognises Jimmy’s gift. Whilst she crosses several lines, dipping ever so slightly towards villainy, it’s impossible to view her through a black-and-white lens. Her actions stem from alienation and longing, but also from a desire to make the world see his gift. Yet, alongside this well-intentioned attempt to encourage his artistry, it is impossible to ignore Lisa’s projection of her own desires onto Jimmy, her subconscious hope that realising his potential will in turn serve as fulfilment for her. The blurred line between mentorship and exploitation, whether the asymmetry of the relationship crosses into something parasitic, depends on individual interpretation.
The Kindergarten Teacher (2018) is available on BFI Player in the UK