An education

Waiting for "Superman"

Crit

Maybe three-fourths of the way through the film, the narrator intones, "Now that we've established that it's possible to give every child a great education, . . . " Sorry, I don't know what the ensuing independent clause was, 'cause I was so taken aback by the dependent: did I miss the part where "we" established that? This is a smug film that doesn't earn its smugness--a smug and very depressing one.

Director Davis Guggenheim, who banked a lot of goodwill capital with An Inconvenient Truth, adopts the structure of the competition documentaries Spellbound and Wordplay, but the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat in those thrilling films is at least partly meritocratic; here we're simply hoping the children we've focused on will profit from a purely arbitrary system--at the expense, of course, of children we haven't gotten to know.

I would love to know what Guggenheim thinks he has shown here. He jumps on the demonize-the-unions bandwagon, but he admits early on that charter schools per se are not the solution, and that good schools come from, duh, good teachers. But he doesn't begin to tell us how we get good teachers. He pays occasional and incoherent attention to the efforts of Michelle Rhee to reform D.C. schools, but I have no idea what conclusions he expects us to draw from her experiences.

It's just sad, and I despair.

Trailer

• Rango--Depp as lizard. No, it's not a sequel to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; it's animated.