WAITING FOR “SUPERMAN” directed by Davis Guggenheim, written by Guggenheim and Billy Kimball. A Paramount Pictures release. 111 minutes. Opens Friday (October 1). For venues, trailers and times, see Movies.
After winning an Oscar for directing a certain groundbreaking doc about climate change, Davis Guggenheim is blowing the whistle on another inconvenient truth. Waiting For “Superman” concerns the abject failure of the U.S. public education system.
“My father taught me that in America if you worked hard and you went to school, you could have a chance, even if you were born in a different country and didn’t speak the language or your parents were poor and you grew up on the wrong side of the tracks,” says the charismatic, thoughtful director during an interview at TIFF.
“That was an American myth, and [it was] true. A lot of great Americans came up through [the system]. It’s not true as much any more. It’s been eroded for a while.”
Waiting For “Superman” examines that erosion, sifting through the mass of red tape at various levels of government and examining the teachers’ unions that protect tenured teachers even when they’re lousy at their jobs.
Guggenheim is revisiting territory covered in his debut film, The First Year, made 10 years ago, which examined public school teachers.
“Outside of their classroom there was this system that was so broken that it tended to wear down all the good people and eat up all the new money,” he says of that first film.
For the new documentary, made with his Inconvenient Truth producer Lesley Chilcott, he wanted to make a movie that attacked the system.
“You’re never going to fix our schools, even with the best intentions, unless you deal with that corrupt and broken system,” he says.
One of the film’s narratives follows a handful of bright, personable kids (most from poor inner-city neighbourhoods) as they and their families try to get them into a school that will give them a fighting chance at finishing high school – not to mention admittance to university. But also included is Emily, a white girl in a wealthy California suburb who looks like she has it all, including a neighbouring high school with an arts room and a good science program.
“Emily represents the dirty little secret of our film,” says Chilcott, “which is that middle-class schools are also not doing well at all. If you’re a kid like Emily and you don’t immediately go to the top track and need a little bit of help, there’s a real danger that you’re not going to get it.”
For a look at how the statistics in Canada compare to those in the U.S., check out waitingforsuperman.com/action/city/canada
glenns@nowtoronto.com
