THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER
Or What happened to prodigies?
Anna's beautiful.
Beautiful...
enough...
for me.
The sun...
hits...
her...
yellow...
house.
It's almost like a sign from God.
That is the poem written by a precocious six year old boy, Jimmy (Parker Sevak). He is in the kindergarten class taught by Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhall), a middle-aged woman who feels she has missed her chance to be an artist, a poet, but, now, has been given the gift of nurturing a child-genius from her class whom she compares to Mozart.
Based on an Israeli movie of the same title, Sara Colangelo's The Kindergarten Teacher examines the life of a teacher who, like the old adage states, cannot do so she teaches.
Lisa has taken an adult education course in writing where she reads her haiku poems to the class. Her stilted poems never quite convey her yearnings and disappointments or her deep feeling that she and all of her family and friends are failures. When the class and its flirty, handsome teacher (Gael Garcia Bernal) greet her epiphanies with indifference she realizes that the time to learn enough to become a poet has passed her by. She reads her poem to her husband (Michael Chernus) who greets it with encouraging words but, obviously, is not moved by it.
When Lisa, accidently, hears Jimmy recite the "Anna" poem she is struck by its deep, moving simplicity. Knowing how wonderful it is, she passes it off as her own poem in her writing class and suddenly she is the star of the class.The poems (written by Kaveh Akbar and Ocean Vuong) are simple yet moving.
Lisa's motives are mixed. She wants the recognition given to her by these stolen gems, but, also, she wants to help this poet-prodigy. She contacts his single-parent dad who runs a strip club. He ignores her but she goes to the club and confronts him. He tells her that he is not interested in his son becoming a literary aesthete like his brother who has a job as a glorified spell checker (editor) at a newspaper earning a pittance. While he is happy his son is doing well, he is not going to go out of his way to encourage his son to be a poet.
Ultimately, The Kindergarten Teacher is about the kind of world we want. Do we want a world that encourages artist? Rewards them? Being an artist is hard and usually not a financially rewarding profession.If you had a choice - great but poor artist child or lottery-winning but soulless child - which would you choose?
Really?