Bad Education Review (4/25/2020)

It can be all too easy to mythologize corruption. The impulse to is understandable; as bad as a bad person in power is, it’s easier to imagine them as some comically evil super villain than just another human being corrupted by a rotten institution. It’s easier to remove one bad egg than it is to replace the whole carton, after all. Regardless, this is a grave mistake to make, and one I’ve seen too many times, especially in recent years.

Bad Education, directed by Cory Finley and starring Hugh Jackman, is based on the real life story of the scandal involving the Roslyn School District, being the largest public school embezzlement scheme in American history. The film is gripping and entertaining even on its surface level; it calls to mind the sort of procedural investigation of a movie like Spotlight in its plot following one high school journalist looking for a story and uncovering a widespread scandal. But unlike Spotlight, Bad Education grounds itself not in the hero but in the villain. Superintendent Dr. Frank Tassone is by all outward appearances a wonderful person; a charming, selfless personality that aims to make anyone and everyone feel comforted and welcome and a man who is wholly dedicated to making his school district the best it can be.

Beneath the surface, though, this is a man who is obsessed with his image in order to cover up secrets. Right off the bat, we can see this in his secret affairs with a young man in Las Vegas. Beneath that is something much darker, though, and between a near scandal involving an assistant of his and the abovementioned student reporting, his image begins to come crumbling down around him. Watching the ensuing story is like reading a particularly compelling news report on a crime story; it’s engaging, engrossing, and leaves you a strange mix of both angry and entertained. There’s one thing that really allows it to stand out, though, and that’s just how much humanity it allows even the worst of its characters to have.

There’s no excuse for what Tassone did - though he does give plenty of them himself. Director Finley, screenwriter Mike Makowsky and lead actor Hugh Jackman work together to portray a deeply flawed, deeply human man, and while they aren’t interested in excusing what he did or rousing too much empathy for him, they are very concerned with showing the good intentions he had at the beginning, the dream he had of a number one school system. He’s a bad, manipulative person, but he’s still human. In a lesser film, this would muddle the message, but in this one, the purpose is clear. It’s not the person that’s the main problem, but the system that let them get away with it. Everybody was happy, and nobody asked questions, and so they got bolder and bolder and slipped further and further as they squeezed more and more out of the people they were supposed to be helping.

When you have a system as corrupt and prone to abuse as the one shown in this film, ousting the figurehead is always a good thing to do - but it ultimately won’t solve the problem. Because at the end of the day, the system that allowed him to do as he did is still in place. And real change will only come when people pay more close attention to those institutions themselves and scrutinize the actions of their leaders. Because as bad as certain individuals can be, if it wasn’t them, it could have been anyone else.

Bad Education is one of the stronger releases of the 2020 Quarantine period. It’s great entertainment grounded by an excellent script and a phenomenal performance from Hugh Jackman. More than that, though, it offers us a look at a microcosm of the forces that shape our society, and encourages us to look more closely in a time where our vision is being diverted more than ever before.