The Paper Chase (1973)
Jamal's Rating: 5 stars
Netflix Average Rating: 3.6 stars
A Harvard law movie that, unlike Legally Blonde with Reese Witherspoon, actually looks like it takes place at a school of real and intelligent students called Harvard. Pretty good summation by a Netflix user: "This film has all the right pieces: good script, good direction, and some very good acting. It is however, not the Dead Poet's Society. If you are looking for some warm sappy idealization of the relationship between teacher and student this is not it." OK, but have I gone on enough about what the movie isn't? Here we have a touching, often hilarious look at one semester in a student's life at a hard university. The main character has a contracts law professor who is so astute, knowledgeable and brilliant, he seems like an enigma, and he and his friends go to great lengths to learn about the mysterious man who keeps an emotional distance from his students, in order to pass the class. The film has scenes with serious undertones, such as one involving a classmate and friend suffering a nervous breakdown in part due to the professor's powerful manner of expressing himself. But it's usually a comedy, giving up close-ups for long shots of the actors, e.g. a very funny scene on an icy pond in which a young man tries to prove to his girlfriend he can be spontaneous. John Houseman won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, but the lead Timothy Bottoms is just as good as the sophisticated, courageous leading man struggling with life's problems but simultaneously thrilled by all its prospects.
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