Movie Reviews for Oleanna

Oleanna

	List Price: ~~$19.98~~ Our Price: $12.49 You Save: $7.49 (37%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $10.00 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases

Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada

Movie Reviews of Oleanna

Movie Review: Fascinating and Frightening
Summary: 5 Stars

A previous reviewer called this film unnerving. Being a university professor, I can certainly attest that it touched a nerve. Oleanna is a fascinating character study that will almost certainly evoke powerful feelings in whoever watches it. After seeing it, I felt a lingering sense of unease that I couldn't quite explain. I thought about the film a long time before the reason dawned on me.

Oleanna is a story about a power play between two relatively unsympathetic characters: a pompous, complacent Professor and a dedicated, but dense, Student. At the start, the failing Student is seeking help from the seemingly indifferent Professor. As the plot slowly unfolds, we see that the Professor is not as uncaring as he initially appears. In fact, he delays a critical real estate deal to stay and counsel the student. Ironically, because of his compassion toward her, the advantage gradually shifts from the Professor to the Student. By the end of the story, it's shockingly clear how high the stakes really were--the power play has morphed into a death match.

Some reviewers have argued that each character's point of view has merit. For example, the Student has sacrificed & struggled to get to college, and is (rightly) angry that she if failing a course by a the Professor who holds higher education in utter contempt. That being said, the Student is clearly unable to grasp anything beyond a literal interpretation of what she reads, hears, or experiences. Because of this, it's painfully obvious that she doesn't belong in college. However, rather than hold her to a clear intellectual standard, the Professor tries to coddle and accomodate her. It is this misguided deed, combined with her literal & paranoid interpretation of his actions, that leads to the Professor's undoing.

In the aftermath of their initial meeting, the Student charges the Professor with sexual harrassment and abuse of power. In subsequent acts, the Professor tries to reason with her, which only makes matters worse. Ultimately, she convinces the all-powerful Tenure committee to embrace her version of the truth. Only in the final act is it revealed she may have been out to destroy the Professor from the start. In fact, there's a not so subtle hint that she thinks she's God. And why shouldn't she? By the end of the story she has managed to change the destiny of both the Professor and herself. So what is the moral of this story? It is, simply, that the educated will let the stupid inherit the Earth. What makes Oleanna particulary frightening is that this can, and does, happen every day.

Movie Review: Interesting Drama
Summary: 5 Stars

This DVD version of the Mamet play has been reviewed by quite a few people in this forum. I just want to add one observation that moves away from the common perception that the play is simply about a mentally disturbed woman who employs feminist politics to presecute a college professor. That's true as far as it goes, but the play also seems to be about a college professor who digs his own grave by undermining the student's faith in the educational process and the institution that provides it. The student comes to the professor with a burning desire to learn, yet a marked inability to understand the terms in which knowledge is transmitted. The professor takes this as a legitimate criticism of traditional education, and an occasion to advance a highly idealistic view of education as the questioning of authority. Unfortunately, this is not what the student is looking for. She wants certainty, security, positive meaning, and the power that, in her mind, the possession of such knowledge confers upon the professor. She wants exactly that which the professor proceeds to denigrate. He overestimates her, which is to say that he utterly fails to understand her in her youthful confusion, yearning, and anxiety. Adrift, she finds the unambiguous truth she desires through her feminist "group", and uses this "knowledge" to turn the tables, to seize for herself the power she perceives the professor as having held over her. In so doing, of course, she destroys not only the professor, but any form of education that you or I would recognize as having value. This, then, might be seen as a comment on the politicization of the curriculum that began in higher education in the 1980s, of an advanced humanism sowing the seeds of its own destruction. The play seems to suggest that society at large cannot accommodate the insights of the humanist intellectuals, but survives on a simpler faith. Our professor destroyed that faith insofar as the student sought it in higher education, so she found it elsewhere. In a sense, his loss of nerve opens the floodgates. I think of Hitchcock's movie, "Rope", also about a professor the effect of whose words on a pair of students provides the "rope" with which he "hangs" himself, in a manner of speaking (the professor in that movie isn't the victim, but he is brought face-to-face with the consequences of his own superficial nihilism. I'm not equating the Macy character's humanism with nihilism, just noting a similarity between the ironic structure of the two films).
Anyway, the Mamet film is a good one to spark excited discussion among students. I recommend it.

Movie Review: Mamet's 2-Person Play
Summary: 5 Stars

David Mamet adapted his 2-person stage play and also directed this powerful, frightening drama that deals with the subject of sexual harassment.

College professor William H. Macy may have his faults, but he sincerely wants to help a disturbed, not-very-bright student (Debra Eisenstadt) when she comes to him to complain about her failing grade. He even offers to give her extra tutoring. But, she won't listen. She "thanks" him by filing sexual harassment charges against him with the university, which not only costs him his tenure but, ultimately, his job.

Still, she isn't satisfied. Her mission seems to be the destruction of this basically decent man. Events escalate into a shocking final confrontation.

Great performances. An excellent script.

© Michael B. Druxman

Movie Review: Well done.
Summary: 5 Stars

It is not an easy thing to attack a trendy kind of facism which makes young people feel important. Even written descriptions of this film stop short of saying whether there is sexual harrassment or not. Brilliantly done.