The History Boys

I am still struggling over how I feel about this movie.

In the eighties, 8 boys from a less-than-stellar English prep school have the chance to try for Oxford or Cambridge. But they must pass the entrance exam and the interviews. So, they come back to school for one term to be taught by their history teachers on how to gain entrance. The problem? One professor, Totty, teaches ancient history rathr dryly and another, the beloved Mr. Hector, teaches general history and poetry and Cole Porter songs and 1940s movies or whatever catched his or they boys' fancy. He is also a a very fat, lonely man who sometimes secretly fondles the boys through ther prep pants, much to their weary, sad boredom.

So new professor Moore is brought in to get the boys ready for the interview. Thus starts a battle on how history is taught and interpretted. The movie tries but fails to be much more than a film of the now-famous stage play. But because the play is so good, it's still watchable (or at least listenable).

The movie leaves us to ponder these "History Boys" and their teachers as live human beings. What did these students and professors take and pass to the rest of history? They often say and do things I greatly admire, and then they turn around and say and do things that make me wince. Then they do questionable things with the very best of intentions. They express their dislikes and admirations in the most uncomfortable and sometimes unlikely of ways.

I didn't like many of their choices. But I believed every minute of it.

I was fascinated by the chaos and strength these boys' budding sexuality brings to the picture - how this gives some of them conflict and others of them a bit of power. Is that power misused? Is merely using sexual power misusing it? Or is this my well-buried Midwestern prudishness showing? ;-)

I was totally captured by what the movie says about how we interpret history, whether we spin it for our own personal needs or cultural times, and whether truth matters so much as interest. “There is nothing so unknown as the recent past.” How true. We hear at least four characters give their view on what history truly is, and each of them says some thing that are true; as well, each of them also says some things that only they themselves can believe in.

One of the things I have always loved in good playwriting is when the author is fiercely honest with all of the characters. Writer Alan Bennett doesn't make characters that are good versus evil, or moral versus immoral. He just creates complex and fascinating people onstage and lets them exist with their wonders, absurdities, honorable qualities and flaws all abounding. We believe them, and we ourselves struggle with them, because they are real. We see our own honorable intentions, our greatest strengths, and our worst weaknesses in their intricate personalities.

I feel that an experience like The History Boys is powerful if it raises all these questions. Great writing is successful if you love and believe the characters even if they often make you squirm, or frustrate you, or break your heart. We so often want the easily answers; we want the “right” people to be good beyond question; we want to root for them. But Alan Bennett knows that real life and great drama never affords us that “luxury.”

I love the thoughts The History Boys has raised. Sometimes it seems we live in a world where thinking and amusement are often are miles apart, where most of us would never put “complicated” and “fun” in the same sentence. I love that we still have works like The History Boys for those of us that do find great enjoyment in being challenged by our entertainment.