Assassination of a High School President
The tagline for this film, “Rushmore meets The Usual Suspects” is reasonable only in that the setting involves a high-class private school, and Bruce Willis as the school’s PTSD-suffering principal rounding up students on The List after finding his private safe mysteriously emptied. In all honesty, this is a Chandlerian detective story in the truest sense taking place not on the mean streets of Los Angeles, but the mean hallways of St. Donovan’s Catholic School. And the main character, the gumshoe Bobby Funke (that’s pronounced funk) played by Reece Daniel, our suffering hero, is a sophomore who hopes to become an investigative journalist. The detective is generally hired by a femme fatale, but in this case the caper begins with an assignment for the school newspaper. A biographic puff piece on the school’s class president which leads to a school-wide conspiracy involving the underground sale of test answers and prescription drugs, the theft of copies of the SAT’s, an all-knowing shadowy figure who alternately berates and encourages our hero, a twisted love triangle, or maybe quadrangle or pent-angle, centered on femme fatale Mischa Barton, and so on and so forth as all detective stories go. Even riding on the coattails of J. G. Levitt’s Brick, it does these things quite well.
But what’s really going on here? Why are the classic noir stories of the 30's and 40's being suddenly recast using teenagers? As we know all detective stories boil down to a particular kind of relationship with what Lacan calls the Big Other- the network of crime or amorality that’s gradually uncovered during the course of the story at the cost of some public humiliation, beatings and a few narrow escapes. The end comes with revelation, the conspiracy unveiled, crimes exposed, innocence is rewarded, guilt is punished. What does it say that these events, usually reserved for aging ex-cops, jaded graybeards and career criminals are being thrust onto the shoulders of fifteen year-olds? Is the noir detective tale more interesting with younger characters? Not necessarily. Could it be that we as a society no longer find the traditional detective tale applicable to adult life, or going further, could it be that we no longer believe that this sort of thing could happen in adult life- the idea that a lone investigator could bring justice to the vast criminal organization? If so, does this herald a fundamental change in the psychology of modern life? These stories describe a particular relationship of one person with the world around him, a relationship that, while confusing and brutal, is not intractable, a knot that our hero can unravel. Perhaps we in our own lives see a different Big Other, one that cannot be understood, no matter how many clues we assemble or how many beatings we take. There will be no revelation, no villains unmasked, no shady characters finally sent to the hoosegow. Unless you’re a teenager. Good luck making sense of things after graduation.
For these are the best years of our lives. Five stars.