STAND AND DELIVER
A Film Review by Manavendra K. Thakur
Copyright 1988 by Manavendra K. Thakur and The Tech.
Reproduced with permission.
1988 105 mins. United States English Rated PG Mono Color 35mm/1.85
Cast: Edward James Olmos, Lou Diamond Phillips, Rosana de Soto, Vanessa Marquez, Virginia Paris, Carmen Argenziano, Mark Eliot, Will Gotay, Patrick Baca, Ingrid Oliu, Tyde Kierney, Bodie Olmos, Karla Montana, Daniel Villarreal, Michael Goldfinger, Michael Yama, Lydia Nicole, Graham Galloway, James Victor, Andy Garcia, Rif Hutton.
Credits: Director: Ramon Menendez. Producer: Tom Musca. Written by Ramon Menendez & Tom Musca. Executive Producer: Lindsay Law. Music by Craig Safan. Editor: Nancy Richardson. Director of Photography: Tom Richmond. Associate Producer: Iya Labunka. Art Director: Milo. Costume Designer: Kathryn Morrison. Supervising Sound Editor: Hamilton Sterling. Project Consultant: Kate Long.
Studio: An American Playhouse Theatrical Film
of a Menendez/Musca & Olmos Production
Distributor: Warner Bros. Inc.
4000 Warner Boulevard
Burbank, CA 91522
(818) 954-6000
The state of the American educational system has received much attention lately, most of it negative. STAND AND DELIVER, in contrast, is a film that tries to paint a positive picture of hope and inspiration. The film brings to the screen the story of Jaime Escalante, a high school teacher in East Los Angeles who managed to motivate and teach the intricacies of calculus to students who hardly knew remedial arithmetic. When he first arrived at Garfield High, he found gym instructors teaching basic math and the halls overrun by gangs and drug runners. The situation was so bad that the predominantly Latino school was in danger of losing its accreditation. But Escalante stayed and began to make a difference.
The film version has toned down the influence of the gangs, eliminated the use of armed guards during the Advanced Placement re-exam, and created composite characters from real students. But the film is otherwise quite faithful to the actual events. Edward James Olmos (Lt. Castillo in MIAMI VICE), who plays Escalante, spent 18 hours a day for a month with the real Escalante to observe his teaching methods and personal habits. [See accompanying article for an interview with Olmos.] Olmos' hard work pays off as he gives a rousing performance that carries the film past its weak first half. Fortunately, the film recovers its own feet before the end.
Americans love a success story, and the first half goes overboard trying to oblige. It introduces the characters and begins to show the unorthodox teaching methods of Escalante (like bringing a machete to class). This half of the film fails, though, to impart to the audience the magic that Escalante worked in his class because of choppy editing and faulty construction. In depicting the positive influence Escalante began to exert, the film glosses over how Escalante managed to calm the students down enough to listen to him in the first place. The way the film presents it, it seems that one day Escalante walked into chaos and by the next day had kids all lined up ready to learn. It may have happened that way in real life, but the film gives only glimpses into how Escalante achieved his remarkable successes.
For example, one gifted young girl named Ana (Vanessa Marquez) tells Escalante that she has to leave school in the middle of the year because her father wants her to help in their family-owned restaurant. Escalante visits the father (James Victor) in his restaurant to try and convince him to let Ana stay in the class. Far from succeeding, however, Escalante ends up arguing loudly with the father. The father soon decides to throw Escalante -- and any hope for Ana's continued education -- out of the restaurant. But lo and behold, the next day, there she is back in school ready to learn, with no sign of what caused her father's remarkable change of heart.
Another botched change-of-heart takes place with hotheaded gang member named Angel (Lou Diamond Phillips), who has letters written on the outer side of his fingers that read ``F-U-C-K Y-O-U'' when he brings his fists together. Dennis Hopper's recent film COLORS was not very good, but it did at least point out that one of the strongest reasons why youths join gangs is to feel a sense of belonging and identity. That film also vividly showed how the gang ethic demands retribution against members of other gangs and those who leave or betray the gang. These issues should be at the top of the list of any filmmaker who wants to show the success of a teacher in a gang-ridden high school.
But these issues are barely mentioned by STAND AND DELIVER. The scene where Angel walks away from his fellow gang members is simply that; the film makes no attempt to examine why Angel would now accept the value of an education when it is clear that he rejected it in the past when he joined the gang. Nor does the film delve into how Angel handles his ex-gang friends once he left the gang. The film introduces these concerns, juggles them like a hot potato, and then drops them without providing any illumination. It seems as though the filmmakers did not want to discuss these matters at all but had to to address them at least slightly to maintain a modicum of credibility.
These examples are typical of how all the first half of the film does is present the end results of Escalante's efforts. By not conveying any sense of how large the barriers the kids overcome really are, the film fails to humanize the students and comes dangerously close to robbing their triumph of its meaning and value to others who may be facing the same situation. As it stands, Escalante and his students seem to be working virtual miracles, and that leaves little room for the audience to identify or cheer for the characters, since they will win out anyway. For a film that wants to be inspirational, this can be quite fatal.
Fortunately for the film, the first half does succeed in setting the stage for the second half, which is where the real value of this film lies. The second part concerns the students' efforts to prepare for and take the Advanced Placement calculus exam, which no student had previously tried in the history of Garfield High. The Educational Testing Service (ETS), which administers the tests, discovers that a number of the students made the same mistake on the test and therefore opened an investigation into possible cheating. Realizing that their scores will be voided is the biggest setback the kids suffer since they came under Escalante's spell, and in addition to upsetting the high school seniors' plans to attend college, the accusations thoroughly demoralize Escalante and his students.
At this point, the film finally begins to examine some of the deeper issues that so badly need to be brought to light. In one tremendously evocative scene, Escalante confronts the ETS investigators (Andy Garcia and Rif Hutton) who have been trying to convince the kids to "confess" how they cheated. Working himself up, Escalante points out that the kids made the same mistake because they all had the same teacher, and he angrily adds that the kids' scores would never have been questioned had the school been located in an upper-class suburb and had the kids' names been non-Hispanic. In another scene later on, Escalante finds himself re-examining the wisdom of his decisions to push the students to learn calculus as hard as he did. These are the types of scenes that display the soul-searching and human weaknesses that firmly ground the film's story in reality and carry the students' eventual triumph to truly inspiring heights.
Throughout the film, the camerawork does little to distinguish itself from the style of made-for-television films, but the final shot of the film is well-composed and deserves some mention. Just prior to the shot, Escalante is in the office of the Principal Molina (Carmen Argenziano) discussing whether the kids really cheated, when a phone call brings news of the kids' excellent scores on the re-test. As the dumbfounded principal reads out the grades in a voice over, Escalante exits the office and walks down the hallway. The camera shows the length of the hallway from the office to the doorway at the far end. As Escalante nears the doorway, he silently permits himself a hand-raised cheer. Then, silhouetted by the light from the doorway and his back still turned to the audience, he keeps on walking down the hallway and out the door, which shuts behind him. After a few more shots, the credits begin to roll.
The reason the shot works so well is the stoic way in which Olmos conveys Escalante's acceptance of the final payoff of all his efforts. Instead of patting himself on the back, Olmos lets the audience cheer for Escalante. Olmos also recognizes that the film's ending is the beginning of Escalante's efforts, and Olmos plays the scene accordingly. The way Olmos walks down the hall through the doorway, one feels that Escalante is going back to his classroom to teach some more students. The camerawork also does not overly hype the triumph. The filmmakers could easily have shifted the point of view to a front view of Olmos and then ended the film on a freeze-frame of Olmos' upraised hand. They wisely chose not to do so. The result of how they did compose the shot is that the ending is easily the best moment in the film.
One of Escalante's innovations was to display posters of Einstein and Galileo in his classroom next to popular sports figures like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Escalante knew that if he could get his students to respect the great thinkers as much as they admired rock stars and movie actors, his battle was half won. The filmmakers show the posters only in the background, but they too know that the real importance of Escalante's story lies in changing viewers' attitudes enough to cheer for a schoolteacher who cares and beats the odds. The filmmakers manage to bring the story to the screen -- although clumsily -- and that in of itself is remarkable and refreshing in the final analysis.
Filmographies:
The filmmakers of STAND AND DELIVER are mainly recent graduates from film schools making their feature film debut. Director Ramon Menendez emigrated to the United States from Cuba in the early 1960s when he was still a child. He enrolled in the UCLA film school in 1976, where he met Tom Musca (producer and co-writer) and Tom Richmond (cinematographer). Editor Nancy Richardson also attended the UCLA film school.
Manavendra K. Thakur
{rutgers,decvax!genrad,ihnp4}!mit-eddie!thakur
thakur@eddie.mit.edu
thakur@athena.mit.edu
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