What’s Aged the Best?
The villains, parent-child conflict, young Ethan Hawke, nuanced teachers, identification with the students, the play-to-suicide sequence, boarding-school setting, poetry, camaraderie, Converse, and the cast’s later careers age best.
In the discussion (15)
Approx. transcript time · 00:12:15Read transcript
- Headmaster Nolan, Cameron, and Mr. Perry form three different kinds of institutional or personal opposition.
- Neil’s inability to tell his father what he wants is praised as an unusually realistic portrait of a frightened child.
- Keating inspires Neil but cannot make the decisive choice for him, preventing the teacher from becoming an all-powerful savior.
- Young Ethan Hawke’s performance contains the reserve and intensity that later defined his career.
- Keating’s poetry exchange with the other teacher gives a conventional authority figure wit and humanity.
- Viewers can identify themselves across Todd, Charlie, Meeks, Neil, and the other boys at different points in life.
- The birthday gift, refusal to walk, phone call from God, and school play retain small character-specific pleasures.
- The play allows Neil’s talent to become visible before his father refuses the hoped-for change of heart.
- The boarding-school setting makes study, friendship, authority, and rebellion part of one enclosed community.
- Ripping out the mathematical poetry scale still feels liberating in a data-centered culture.
- Smoking, radios, teasing, shared rooms, and casual physical play make the boys’ friendship feel lived in.
- The movement from the play through the family confrontation and suicide is praised as controlled and emotionally devastating.
- The early focus on Neil during Keating’s mortality lesson is read as possible visual foreshadowing.
- Converse are explicitly added as something that aged best.
- After this movie, the panel rooted for all the kids in whatever they did.