I went to a mostly Jewish high school. During the high holidays, the few non-Jewish kids would be rounded up in a single classroom under the steely gaze of our school's senior Latin teacher. Mr. Ritaccio cut a dashing figure with his crew-cut, bowtie and high-wattage smile. No Mr. Chips, no second-rate standup comic desperate to please, he was tough and fair, and he brooked no nonsense.
Fifty years later, Chalk (opening Friday at Landmark Theatres) features a cast of comic actors impersonating Texas high school teachers. Chalk 's creators, director/writer Mike Akel and co-writer/actor Chris Mass, hope their mockumentary can show why 50% of American teachers quit within the first three years. Chalk displays a collection of ill-trained, insecure young adults embarrassing themselves in front of a generation of students who will talk only on their phones. Mr. Ritaccio would regard this school as the educational version of a flea circus. I would want to be home-schooled. While a devastating portrait of our society, Chalk does have its moments as a movie. The film's format has the teachers parading their insecurities in video diaries. Janelle Schremmer is outstanding as a young, butch gym teacher who knows she's going to be totally misunderstood.
"I have a few instances where students or teachers have assumed I was gay, and I think it's a mixture of I'm a P.E. teacher, my hair's short, I don't know if that affects the way guys see me, I don't know if they assume that I'm gay and I wouldn't be interested in them, but not all P.E. teachers are gay."
Schremmer's Coach Webb has mastered the most annoying traits in the bossy P.E. instructor playbook. In a telling moment, she commands a long-haired student to fall back into the arms of another male, asking the kid to display a level of trust that she can't summon up for any human on this suburban Austin campus. Schremmer subtly dials up the coach's officious manner: first bullying a female teacher to bust a student for tardiness, and finally launching into a raging hissy-fit against a former friend who's landed the Sisyphus-like job of assistant principal.
Warning: the best gags are in the trailer. Chalk is a fitfully amusing, episodic autopsy of a culture that appears to have undermined the student/teacher relationship. A conscientious but socially inept teacher, Mr. Lowrey (the beguilingly nebbish-acting Troy Schremmer), hits a speed-bump when he tries to confiscate the cell phone of an obnoxiously insubordinate student. Mr. Lowrey finds himself commanded to a kind of show-trial humiliation at the hands of the kid's nimbly castrating mom. One understands exactly why New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has ordered student phones banned from the classroom.
Overflowing with good intentions, Chalk demonstrates that the mockumentary may be in as much trouble as our schools. Even Christopher Guest's recent efforts seem flabby. Akel and Mass should have based their purgatory-like drama (a title-card ominously warns "33 months to summer") on a solid, precise script that could have been a platform for bracing satire. There's nary a beat in Chalk that is not surpassed in Half Nelson, Rocket Science, Thumbsucker. Dazed and Confused, Fast Times at Ridgemont High or any of a dozen fictional films about American education at the breaking point, etched in scary social realism or black comedy.