A Netflix viewing on February 16th in Chicago. This one caught my wife's eye since she herself taught kindergarten.
The film is directed by Sara Colangelo and stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as the aforementioned kindergarten teacher, Lisa Spinelli. Lisa teaches kindergarten on Staten Island and does not appear to be all that happy with her life. She and her husband love each other but the fire has gone out. Her teenage children are distant and quite frankly a bit ungrateful, probably like most teenagers. Lisa is taking a poetry course at night but she's really not that good a poet.
One day at school, she hears one of her students, Jimmy Roy (Parker Sevak), starts blurting out verse and it catches Lisa's ear. A six year old randomly spouting poetry? To say she becomes obsessed with Jimmy is a bit of an overstatement. She begins investigating Jimmy's family to find out where it comes from. Eventually Jimmy tells her that it just comes out. She even takes Jimmy to a Manhattan poetry open mic night to recite his poetry. She believes Jimmy to be a prodigy that no one will understand or care about because it's poetry. Suffice to say Lisa makes a series of bad decisions that won't end well for her. Or Jimmy for that matter.
This is a really underrated film. It received a well deserved 91% Roteen Tomatoes rating. Strong performances all around, Colangelo does a nice job of keeping your attention with good pacing a tension build ups. If you have Netflix, then this is a film worth seeing. It has a 96 minute run time and moves well. It has a sad ending so be warned,
No comments:
Post a Comment