STAND AND DELIVER
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1988 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: What kind of a film would appeal both to the Hispanic community and to mathematicians? The true story of a math teacher who fights to make mathematicians out of barrio kids. This plot has been done dozens of times as a fictional sports story. but rarely this well and rarely with a subject that has the immediate appeal that calculus does. Rating: +2.
American Playhouse produces quality feature-length films primarily to be shown on PBS. Rare is the year that they have not made a film that deserves to be at least nominated for Best Picture, though to the best of my knowledge they have never received any such nomination. Some of their better work is released to theaters, though whether it is produced with that market in mind, I do not know. However, their films TESTAMENT and EL NORTE did get shown in theaters well before going to television. Their current release is STAND AND DELIVER.
You have probably seen before the plot of the losing team and the coach who uses unorthodox techniques and understanding to build the team into champions. Things are different here. First, this is a true story and second, we are not talking about football or basketball, we are talking about calculus. This is the story of how a math teacher in a barrio school fought to take students who had a hard time learning fractions and turn them into some of the country's top scorers in the advanced college placement tests. Edward James Olmos plays Jaime Escalante, who is willing to play clean or hit below the belt to taunt his students to make something of themselves. His classes are peppered with under-the-breath (and over-) cutting remarks about math and life in the barrio. ("Tough guys don't need math. Tough guys fry chicken for a living.")
I guess that STAND AND DELIVER shows one of my childhood fantasies actually coming true--I always thought that if even the school toughs found out what math was really like, it would become the cool thing in the school to be really into math, much like it really was for football. This film actually shows that in one very unlikely school, math did become the "in thing." But I guess what I find most amazing is that the film was made at all. I mean, it's one thing to sell a kid from the barrio on the idea that math is nifty. There is intelligence there you can appeal to. But to sell calculus to a film producer is something else again. This fine film could have been sold only to something like American Playhouse. Rate it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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