But the message is wrong
2007-01-30
I'm in two minds about recommending Scent of a Woman. On the one hand, it's a great film. Mainly because Al Pacino is excellent, but various other elements are pretty good too. The downside I'm about to rant about, in spoiler fashion.
Unfortunately, the rant, which was long and arduous to type, seems to have gone missing. Apparently refreshing Firefox to avoid submit timeouts isn't as foolproof as it used to be (or perhaps I am now a higher grade fool).
Maybe I can be bothered to write it up again later.
Take Two
I'll précis this a little, since I already wrote it once.
Basically, the main character's dilemma is that he was witness to a 'crime' (an offence against the school rules), and he's convinced he should cover up for the perpetrators. The school is threatening with expulsion. He spends a weekend with a crazy blind Colonel, comes back and sticks to his plan: claiming he didn't see anything. A rousing speech from the blind man convinces the disciplinary committee that the school shouldn't be encouraging people to 'snitch', because it claims to be preparing people for high office and people in high office should have enough integrity to stick up for their friends (who in this case have no loyalty to the main character whatsoever, and he knows it), the rules of their society and position be damned.
The White House is mentioned a couple of times. Apparently it would be better to have as President someone who put his 'friends' before his responsibility to his office. I think we've seen that before: I think I'd rather have someone loyal to his country, and smart enough to realise that putting his friends before the law is a far greater betrayal and breech of the desired principles than letting justice take them and consider them.
I can understand how people could have loyalties strong enough to make them do wrong (I have some myself, for relatively small wrongs), or how they might be afraid to testify (an issue that the film doesn't seem to cover at all), but I think that claiming in all cases loyalty to one's peers overrides concerns of justice or institution is crazy, and that glorifying that stand in a film is just stupid.
The previous attempt to write this also mentioned briefly the comically arbitrary nature of school justice: the fact that even though he probably couldn't prove that our hero could identify the perpetrators, the principle is prepared to throw expulsions around like there's no tomorrow. This always seemed to be a common factor in schools, where even the most just of staff don't have the resources for proper investigations and often don't even seem to have the luxury of leaving a crime unpunished because there's reasonable doubt as to who did it.
Next time I'll try and submit the whole thing, first time ;-)
Unfortunately, the rant, which was long and arduous to type, seems to have gone missing. Apparently refreshing Firefox to avoid submit timeouts isn't as foolproof as it used to be (or perhaps I am now a higher grade fool).
Maybe I can be bothered to write it up again later.
Take Two
I'll précis this a little, since I already wrote it once.
Basically, the main character's dilemma is that he was witness to a 'crime' (an offence against the school rules), and he's convinced he should cover up for the perpetrators. The school is threatening with expulsion. He spends a weekend with a crazy blind Colonel, comes back and sticks to his plan: claiming he didn't see anything. A rousing speech from the blind man convinces the disciplinary committee that the school shouldn't be encouraging people to 'snitch', because it claims to be preparing people for high office and people in high office should have enough integrity to stick up for their friends (who in this case have no loyalty to the main character whatsoever, and he knows it), the rules of their society and position be damned.
The White House is mentioned a couple of times. Apparently it would be better to have as President someone who put his 'friends' before his responsibility to his office. I think we've seen that before: I think I'd rather have someone loyal to his country, and smart enough to realise that putting his friends before the law is a far greater betrayal and breech of the desired principles than letting justice take them and consider them.
I can understand how people could have loyalties strong enough to make them do wrong (I have some myself, for relatively small wrongs), or how they might be afraid to testify (an issue that the film doesn't seem to cover at all), but I think that claiming in all cases loyalty to one's peers overrides concerns of justice or institution is crazy, and that glorifying that stand in a film is just stupid.
The previous attempt to write this also mentioned briefly the comically arbitrary nature of school justice: the fact that even though he probably couldn't prove that our hero could identify the perpetrators, the principle is prepared to throw expulsions around like there's no tomorrow. This always seemed to be a common factor in schools, where even the most just of staff don't have the resources for proper investigations and often don't even seem to have the luxury of leaving a crime unpunished because there's reasonable doubt as to who did it.
Next time I'll try and submit the whole thing, first time ;-)
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