The Gyllenhaal siblings have been giving iffy projects credibility since Donnie Darko. Jake got his big breakout movie showcase with Nightcrawler. Now it’s Maggie’s turn. The Kindergarten Teacher is a wonderful vehicle for sister Gyllenhaal’s talents, giving her a juicy character to sink her acting teeth into.
Gyllenhaal plays Lisa, a kindergarten teacher going through a version of a midlife crisis. Bored at home, she takes a poetry class to hopefully entice the inner artist to come out. One day, she hears little Jimmy (Parker Sevak) in her class say an amazing poem. Lisa writes this down, and presents it as her own in class, mesmerizing everyone with its talent, including Simon (Gael Garcia Bernal), her poetry professor. However, the more Lisa learns about Jimmy’s home life, the more she realizes his artistic talent isn’t being nurtured, so she takes a bigger and bigger role in overseeing his growth….maybe a little too much of a role.
The Kindergarten Teacher becomes really hard to watch by the end of the movie. At first, you think you’re watching a directionless woman just going through the motions then discovering something new and amazing she wants to associate with: Jimmy’s talent. You can see it lights a new fire under Lisa: she’s engaged in poetry class now because of the attention she’s getting, she pulls Jimmy aside in class to give him ideas like perspective while the other kids are napping, and she’s enlisting Jimmy’s babysitter in her quest to make him grow into the next poet laureate. Then the strangeness slowly but progressively enters. As you might have guessed, the babysitter doesn’t care about Jimmy, and the poems she presents in class make Lisa a star, so she spends an inordinate amount of time pulling Jimmy out of activities to get more poems. That success breeds more success, pushing Lisa further: she visits an uncle who encourages Jimmy to try to get into contact with Jimmy’s father. Um…weird, but not crossing lines. Then she tells Jimmy he can call her when he has a poem. O……k…… I think you see where this is going. Lisa’s desperation for artistic expression leads her to become a habitual line stepper, pushing her behavior further and further into obsession and madness territory. The last 20 minutes of the film are an exercise in pure terror because of the scale and depth of Lisa’s descent.
The entirety of The Kindergarten Teacher’s success rests with Maggie Gyllenhaal, and the amazing actress is up to the task. Gyllenhaal poses the warmth that makes her believable as a kindergarten teacher, but also is really good at projecting melancholy, malaise, and exhaustion into the role once the kids are asleep/out of class. As Lisa begins her march toward the badness, Gyllenhaal gives Lisa a combination of excitement and built-up determination to be put to use, but under the guise of a seemingly harmless teacher. By the time the obsession has taken hold, Gyllenhaal plays Lisa as a woman completely convinced she’s the only sane, good person in the world, nurturing a god given talent to become something. The end of the movie, though you’re watching through covered eyes, is a tour de force from Gyllenhaal, opening up all the emotions she’s been keeping repressed for so long.
I hope that The Kindergarten Teacher catches on on Netflix. If it does, they might throw some weight around awards season, especially for Maggie Gyllenhaal, who was long overdue for a movie that uses her talents to best effect. Hopefully this success means we can get the Gyllenhaal siblings act-off movie that I’ve been waiting for since Donnie Darko. Minus the prophetic metallic rabbit.