I so wanted this to be good.
It’s not good.
The Teacher is about a Palestinian teacher in the West Bank trying to keep a kid in his class on the straight and narrow while the Occupation impacts every single aspect of their lives. What could be a more relevant story in our current times? Yeah, but it’s basically Dangerous Minds set in Palestine. The dialogue is cringingly obvious and on-the-nose. Much of the plot just feels like a checklist of headline topics being ticked off. Despite great performances from Saleh Bakri and Muhammad Abed Elrahman, they are confined by characters which function more as vehicles for the writer’s point than as three-dimensional people. It’s very after school special.
Imogen Poots shows up as the sympathetic white Western audience insert character, touring the lives of people she can do nothing but cry about and wring her hands over. She’s there as love interest and pseudo-mother figure. Only at one point does anyone mutter anything under their breath about her, otherwise she’s universally welcomed.
I feel that I have to say in fairness, it does get slightly better as the film goes on, as it delves into the teacher’s backstory, how he took his only son to a protest which led to the son’s arrest, imprisonment and death in custody. But again, it feels very functional to the plot, explaining why he’s taking such an interest in this boy in his class, and trying to teach him how to survive the Occupation while somehow staying out of trouble.
While 90% of the film follows the teacher, there’s a strand following an American couple whose son has emigrated to Israel to fight in the IDF, and who is now captured and being held until he can be traded for the release of Palestinian political prisoners. The entire point of this storyline is so there can be a confrontation between the teacher and the soldier’s father, where he can say the line, “they believe your son is worth a thousand of mine”. In my opinion, this whole storyline could be cut, and just the scenes leading the father to learn the teacher’s name and confronting him at the school would be enough. There’s literally nothing added by watching the father and mother drive around in cars and fight over blaming each other.
The problem with this whole film is the bones of what the filmmaker intends the audience to think, feel, believe and take away is laid so bare, there’s almost nothing to immerse yourself in as a story, as characters. You can tell beat for beat where this all going, it’s painfully obvious, and you feel talked at rather than talked to.