Of all the films I'm re-watching for this project, this is the one I remember least. I knew there was a woman who called herself Rita but that wasn't her name. I knew she was trying to get an education to better herself. I knew that her husband didn't like it, and I knew that her tutor was a crazy drunk who ended up getting himself thrown out of his university. And, since that's very nearly the entirety of the story, I guess my memory is better than I thought it was.
So, not a terribly complex or original story. Also, the score was pretty bad, a relic of the 80s, a whiny synth playing not-bad music but making it sound terrible. The direction by Lewis Gilbert, a veteran of a whole pile of James Bond films, was extremely pedestrian. Also, during scenes where we're getting what amounts to narration from Rita, when she's telling a story or we're hearing a letter she's written, the sound is out of synch with the background action. The film doesn't have an array of well-done offerings for the viewer.
What it does have, though, is Julie Walters as Rita and Michael Caine as Frank, and a script that lets them be brilliant. Rita (her real name is Susan, but Frank calls her Rita throughout and I'm gonna as well) is one of my favorite film characters. Her life is exactly what the folks around her think she should want. She's married to a man who loves her, she has a decent job and a home of her own which her husband Denny (Malcolm Douglas) is working hard to improve. All she has to do now is start having babies and raise a perfect little family. But Rita isn't ready for children. “I don't want a baby yet. No, I want to discover myself first.” We later learn that she's been taking birth control pills on the sly, so apparently she's already tried to discuss this with Denny and the conversation didn't end well. But Rita is convinced that there's a larger world of thought and knowledge that she's missed, and she's determined to study literature to find it.
So we meet Frank, a disaffected literature professor, who is going to tutor Rita to ready her for exams. Frank is a poet who can no longer write, and a teacher who no longer cares about teaching. When he first meets Rita, and realizes how earnest she is and what an education means to her, he tries to chase her off. “Between you and me and the walls, actually I'm an appalling teacher. That's alright most of the time. Appalling teaching is quite in order for most of my appalling students, but it is not good enough for you, young woman.” But she responds, “You're my tutor. I don't want another tutor...because you're a crazy mad piss-artist who wants to throw his students through the window. I like you.”
Denny doesn't understand her urge to better herself. When he finds her birth-control pills, he burns all her books and papers, and issues an ultimatum: either she quits school and gets serious about raising a family, or he's done with her. This resonates with me, actually. It isn't that Denny specifically wants her ignorant or subservient; he seems to love her and the life they had before she became dissatisfied, but he's afraid that if she betters herself she'll become too good for him. My family is full of people who feel exactly the same way. My grandmother, who was the best Gramma ever, was a terrible mother, and once she did exactly this to my father; made him take all his books down into the basement and burn them in the furnace. Some people are afraid that they themselves can't improve, and so they want to keep the people they care about down on their own level, and if those people try to take them along on the voyage towards knowledge and discovery they take it as an insult. It's a desire that comes from love, but it's right at the root of so many problems in our society. Every parent who derides the universities for filling kids' heads with crazy ideas (and Rita's own father fits into this mold) is really afraid that his children will realize that he's a fool, that his values are unconsidered, that much of what he's taught them is utter bullshit.
Denny is my grandparents, and my aunts and uncles and cousins. I'm very fortunate that he isn't my parents. His character is sensitively written and competently played. People like him are, in fact, sympathetic characters. They mean well, but they're utterly destructive, and while it's sad that Rita must leave him, it's also a relief when she finally does. My father had to run away from home to go to college; I see a lot of him in the Rita we first meet, strangely enough. There's a lot of allure for me in a character willing to abandon everything for the love of learning.
Frank exhibits behavior not so different from Denny's, in a way. Early on in their relationship he cuts back on his drinking. Rita sort of brings him back to life, reminds him of how wonderful the actual literature is, rather than just the brilliant things that can be said about it. In fact it's implied that he's quit drinking altogether while she's at summer school. But she comes back knowing things that he didn't teach her. He's been looking forward all summer to introducing her to William Blake, and it turns out that she can already recite it from memory. He seems a little heartbroken, and the next time we see him in the office, we see him grabbing his bottle from its hiding place behind the books on his shelves. Like Denny, he has trouble realizing that Rita is more than what she means to him. They never have another moment where he's at ease with her. Instead we get, at best, this sort of passive-aggressive behavior from him, the “oh, well, you don't need my help, you can do this all by yourself” kind of thing. Later in the film he equates himself with Mary Shelley, and though he doesn't go so far as to say out loud that he's created a monster, it's a very selfish moment.
But Rita is at her worst in that scene as well. She's so superficial. She's begun to lose the love of learning for its own sake. At the end of their argument she snaps at him, “Oh, Rita! Nobody calls me Rita but you. I dropped that pretentious crap as soon as I saw it for what it was,” but of course she's abandoned that obvious pretension for a more subtle one. The books, the poetry, the music should matter because of what it teaches her about the world, and about herself, but instead it matters to her because it makes her popular, helps her fit in with the upper-class kids who are her peers as students. She abandoned her old life for an education in the first place to find herself, but she's stopped looking.
Things develop further from there, with Rita ultimately realizing that she's lost her way and trying to find her way back and Frank, having destroyed himself, trying to start over (another storyline that appeals to me). I won't go into any details of that, because if you're reading this and haven't seen the film you should go watch it. We can discuss the last twenty minutes in the comments if you'd like. For now I'll just say that Rita and Frank have a very nice scene in Frank's office that should have been their last (there's a superfluous goodbye at the very end as well) and you end up feeling pretty good about the direction everyone's going in. Simple happy ending, but like I said earlier, it wasn't about the story so much as it was about the characters.
Caine, of course, is great. He's always great, even when he's fighting swarms of killer bees or running from a shark that possesses surprising tactical abilities. It seems like a little less work went into developing Frank's character than Rita's, which is understandable, but Caine fills in the gaps. He brings his own depth to the character. And Walters is perfect, smart and sharp-witted and genuine, and every discussion between the two in the film is classic. It's almost a shame, really, that anyone else had to be in it. I could happily have watched those two in Frank's ratty old office talking for 100 minutes. So let me not close without mentioning the screenwriter, Willy Russell. He got nominated for an Oscar for this, as did Walters and Caine (he lost to James L. Brooks for Tender Mercies). He was a playwright and didn't do a lot of film work. That's too bad; he would have been better than most.
DOES IT HOLD UP?: Yes it does. I had given it a seven, based on my memories of it, and it gets a seven still. The Elephant Man and Diner both lost points during my re-watches, but this didn't. What surprises me most is how much I liked it when it was new. I must have been a more serious and mature kid than I remember being. I was twelve when this came out, and really, this is a thoughtful, grown-up film that doesn't seem to have much to offer a teenager. It's got an awful lot to offer an adult, though. I'm glad I watched it again.
BEST THING ABOUT THE FILM: “I hate smokin' on my own. Everybody's packed up these days. Afraid of gettin' cancer. Bloody cowards.” I couldn't possibly have said it better. But that's only my favorite line. Rita is such a deep and interesting character. I wish more films had characters as well-drawn and acted. I would love movies even more than I do now.
WORST THING ABOUT THE FILM: Gilbert doesn't seem to have realized that he wasn't making another Bond. There are lots of quick cuts and zooms to closeup and so forth that don't really suit the project, and I can't say a lot for the photography either. And when he isn't Bonding us to death he's so by-the-numbers, like the shot of Rita's face, framed in a window pane, with a tear on her cheek while Denny burns the books. That's such a film-school shot. He wasn't necessarily bad, but he didn't offer anything, either. If he had done work worthy of what Walters and Caine were doing, this film would be a nine-star at least and one of the best of the Eighties.
SCORE: 7/10, but a quite high seven, and the best film I've seen so far on this project.
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