Review: The Professor Is a Diverting Yet Disingenuously Virtuous Time Killer

The film goes down easy because it saves the self-improvement clichés for the homestretch.

The Professor
Photo: Saban Films

Wayne Roberts’s The Professor concerns an intelligent and privileged man who grows bored with the comfortable stagnancy of his life and decides to live out loud, ingesting even more alcohol than usual, getting back into weed again, and chasing women. Lingering over this scenario is the possibility of death, which is meant to give the mild hedonism a tang of gravitas. As such, The Professor’s narrative recalls that of Sam Mendes’s American Beauty, as well as those of a variety of other films, shows, and novels that mine an especially American male strand of resentment, in which men feel that they were cheated out of their proper proportion of adventure, sexual and financial gratification, and ego massage.

American Beauty is insufferable for refusing to own up to what it’s actually selling, which is a glorification of self-absorption. The film contextualizes its protagonist’s antics as parts of a larger message that amounts to nothing more profound than “seize the day.” If one is to truly seize the day, then one should stop settling for such peppy banalities. American Beauty’s idea of rebellion is also pitiful—certainly reflective of a bored middle-aged man’s fantasies—though this irony isn’t satirized by Mendes and screenwriter Alan Ball. Surprisingly, The Professor improves on the formula somewhat. The film goes down easy because Roberts reserves most of the self-improvement clichés for the last 15 minutes of the running time. Until then, he uses his conceit mostly as an excuse to allow his star actor to freely express his impulses.

As Richard, an English professor dying of cancer, Johnny Depp gives his most purely enjoyable performance in some time, one that’s shorn of the more overt gimmickry he’s adopted over the years as the star of so many bloated blockbusters. Depp is still in his “mid-period Brando” phase, in which his inescapable talent and force of personality aren’t quite separable from the sense that he’s sleepwalking. Like Brando, Depp can make aloofness weirdly sexy and democratic, as this quality helps him forge a complicit kinship with his audience. Most people watching The Professor will recognize that it’s following a formula, and Depp’s light air of who-gives-a-fuck-ness is a way of saying “let’s see what we can do with this.” These qualities also suit Richard, who throws out his syllabus and begins binge drinking with his students.

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Richard is allowed to air pithily cruel observations that reflect his status as an over-educated, self-pitying artist of sorts. After dismissing one super-earnest, feminist student, Richard advises the rest of the class to “steer very clear of anyone who has even the faintest, slightest whiff of intentional conception.” When Richard is bickering and drinking with his equally bitter and sozzled wife, Veronica (Rosemarie DeWitt), The Professor occasionally, and promisingly, resembles a sitcom variation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The relationship this couple has, a kind of kinship brokered in the comfort of reliable betrayal, is more nuanced than the histrionic marriage at the center of American Beauty.

Still, why are midlife-crisis movies always so skittish about their central reason for existing? We see these films to watch attractively debauched stars have the sex, do the drugs, and say the things that we have neither the ability nor the balls to do and say. Why must that poignant urge—reflective of our collective disappointment in ourselves, and justification enough for a film—be cloaked in secondhand sermonizing? Roberts at least partially understands that Richard’s penchant for self-help speeches is ridiculous and indulgent, but he doesn’t see the inherent humor in one of the film’s central ideas: that Richard’s supposedly radical restructuring of his curriculum simply involves smoking weed in a park and having students deliver high school-level book reports. If Roberts had satirized Richard while simultaneously enjoying his character’s drunken, haughty promiscuity, he might’ve fashioned a bracingly adult comedy, rather than a diverting yet disingenuously virtuous time killer.

Score: 
 Cast: Johnny Depp, Rosemarie DeWitt, Zoey Deutch, Ron Livingston, Danny Huston, Odessa Young, Justine Warrington, Kaitlyn Bernard, Linda Emond  Director: Wayne Roberts  Screenwriter: Wayne Roberts  Distributor: Saban Films  Running Time: 90 min  Rating: R  Year: 2018  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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