Way Too Late to the Movies: School of Rock

Today, for the first time, I watched 2003's School of Rock, starring Jack Black and Joan Cusack. I don't know where I was, exactly, that I let this one pass me by. Though I have to admit I wasn't really a fan of Black until I saw Jared Hess' Nacho Libre, so maybe retconning the whole Jack Black fandom is in order.

Because this was a terrific film.

While it clearly has that fish-out-of-water Dead Poets Society vibe to it, School of Rock is a lot less pretentious and preachy. No one has to die uselessly for his or her art and the lessons are more "find something you enjoy doing it, even if you're not all that good at it" than anything else.

I expected Black to be a lot more, well, Jack Black in this. But he approached the role of Dewey Finn with just enough understatement that the character remained a character, not a caricature. And I really enjoyed the fact that the conflict remained almost entirely in the kids' world of finding enjoyment in something unexpected, rather than in what typically might have happened: The stiff, boring adults come rushing in to destroy everything, only to have the kids triumph at the end.

Because despite the triumph of the encore, the kids don't win the contest they enter. We don't see a sudden revolution at the snooty private elementary school (do those even exist) where the stiffest of teachers and parents disappear while the rest of them all slide gracefully into Dewey's sphere of influence. This film is grounded in the reality that not everyone is going to want to stick it to The Man, and not because they are or personify The Man in any way. Those who are interested in rock 'n' roll find it and leave the squares to themselves.

And while we see Dewey figure out the stiff principal's Achilles heel in her (Joan Cusack's) penchant for getting drunk and singing Stevie Nicks tunes, the payoff in that knowledge is so understated we can believe that the world of the school and the world of the School of Rock have to fission -- which they would in the real world -- rather than seeing the snooty school go all rocky in the end. This was a fun film that put finding and honing talent in the real world, not in some unachievable fantasyland. That might be its greatest gift of all.