Now my corny lame principal doesn’t seem so awful. Bad Education is perfect viewing for a cynic, like say a sullen teenager. If you were distrusting of adults before, then this film will only intensify your efforts to find the Lynchian underbelly of what looks like your normal high school existence.
Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman) has been riding a wave of awesome. As superintendent of Roslyn High School District in Long Island, the school’s status has vaulted to 4th best in the country. Working with his trusted PIC Pam (Allison Janney), Frank’s won the approval of Bob Spicer (Ray Romano) and the board; not only for how great the schools are, but for how real estate prices have skyrocketed at the same time because of Roslyn. Frank’s next big project is a sky bridge connecting the school, which school reporter Rachel (Geraldine Viswanathan) is writing about for the school paper. But then Rachel starts digging…
Many adults have a hard time understanding their true selves, because like anyone, we’d like to see ourselves as the hero of our own story. So that means “lying to yourself” is out of the question. So, like the adults in Bad Education” you simply replace the word “lie” with the word “justify” and it all feels better: “yes I did a bad thing, but…we’re #4!!!!” The problem with benefitting from lying is that you start believing that more lies will simply continue to make things better, resulting in you simply warping reality to whatever is in your head. Pam’s lies revolve around her wanting to believe the best in her family, so she “justifies” by bettering the lives of the people she loves. When, obviously, in truth, she’s “helping” at the expense of young kids and to help inflate her ego. Frank’s depths of delusion are even worse. At least Pam seems to care for her family: Frank is a Patrick Bateman type: sweet, delightful exterior with a hollow center that he’s hidden from himself. Plunging deeper into Frank’s persona is equally exciting and horrifying, thanks to Hugh Jackman’s slowly unraveling performance.
So how do you break the lying spiral? The truth shall set you free. Maybe the creators didn’t trust Geraldine Viswanathan with more screen time (too bad: she’s usually the best part of everything she does), but it would have been nice to parallel her investigation a little more equally with the Frank/Pam farce. That being said, Viswanathan is deployed smartly in Bad Education, sort of operating on the down low, quietly finding the truth in the shadows like our version of the perfect journalist until the time was right to report the story. Once the truth hits, we see the unraveling of everyone, and it is…unpleasant. As old as time, you see people in power getting louder and more cruel trying to bury the truth, and deflect opportunistically. The ending finds the perfect, dark note, as Frank sees what happens when he tells the truth versus lying, and why he picked lying, every time.
So props to you real life Rachel Bhargava. Bad Education would have been WAY worse if you hadn’t executed editorial authority and published your story against the wishes of the people trying to educate you. And for you Frank, you can go on living your lies in prison, though it might be hard to do that within the confines of a jail cell.