'The Kindergarten Teacher' is worth seeing for Maggie Gyllenhaal鈥檚 performance
Based on a 2014 Israeli film of the same name, 鈥淭he Kindergarten Teacher鈥� is one of those movies with a terrific premise left unfulfilled.
Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Lisa Spinelli, the titular teacher who is at first intrigued, then entranced, and finally obsessed by 5-year-old Jimmy (Parker Sevak), a pupil with a prodigious gift for writing poetry. Where it gets weird is that, an amateur poet herself, Lisa palms off Jimmy鈥檚 verse as her own in the nighttime poetry class she is taking in lower Manhattan. (Her teacher is fetchingly played by Gael Garc铆a Bernal.) It gets weirder, and more improbable, than this, and not in ways that always make a whole lot of psychological sense.
The premise of a schoolteacher so taken with a prodigy in her midst is so good that this film鈥檚 vagaries, written and directed by Sara Colangelo, are doubly unsatisfying. And yet I believe it鈥檚 worth seeing for Gyllenhaal鈥檚 performance. She is one of the rare actresses who can project real intelligence in all its maddening moods. We watch Lisa slide inexorably into a kind of open-eyed fugue state as she descends ever deeper into mania. She is as believable as the movie is not. Grade: B- (Rated R for some language and nudity.)
