FOR BETTER MARKS, `BOYS' NEEDED TO STUDY HARDER.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

I report with genuine sadness that one of the smarter, more innovative and, indeed, most important theater sensations of the last several years has hit movie screens rather too, well, theatrically for its own good.

``The History Boys,'' opening today, its Tony-winner-studded cast transferred nearly intact from Broadway and Britain's National Theatre, still has wonderful things to say about learning, tolerance and forgiveness.

But even though stage/film director Nicholas Hytner and playwright/screenwriter Alan Bennett have tried to open up their piece for the more naturalistic medium of film, it might have been better just to aim a few cameras at a sparse schoolroom-dressed stage. The words that spill out of the characters' mouths -- literate and exuberantly brimming with ideas -- struggle to ring persuasively in real world surroundings.

Set in a drab North England city circa 1980, the story follows the summer preparations of eight exceptional 18-year-olds to pass the tests that will get them into Cambridge or Oxford.

The boys aren't what you'd call overly developed. There's the charismatic one, the self-deprecating gay one, the one who doesn't care, the Muslim one ... all nicely limned by young British stage actors, but none that stick in the memory.

Their teachers are far more compelling. The great Richard Griffiths (``Withnail and I,'' assorted Harry Potters) is the portly, pathetic but nonetheless inspiring Hector. Rumpled and wild-haired, he's like a Lewis Carroll grotesque come to life. But his love of learning for learning's sake is infectious, and Griffiths does the best of anyone in the ensemble to make his personality pop in a proper movie way.

Hector is also interested in more than his students' minds, and the boys have generally agreed to laugh off the wimpy groping that's the price of a ride home on the educator's scooter. The story views this as less troubling than the attitude of a new teacher, Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), who's brought in by the results-oriented headmaster (Clive Merrison) to teach the boys effective shortcuts to university acceptance.

Some may have a problem with Bennett's ranking of the piece's moral imperatives. And it becomes more of a narrative problem, in the movie anyway, as emphasis shifts more and more to questions of sexual orientation and away from the rarer topic of how knowledge should be passed from one generation to another.

Irwin, however, is presented more sympathetically in the film than on stage, and that's good; his approach isn't evil, just reductive. But that brings up another interesting comparison to how the piece works live. ``History Boys'' was widely praised by theater critics for jettisoning the kind of sentimentality that has marred most great teacher stories. And that's definitely true, but there's a newer kind of cheapened emotion in the movie. Instead of humanizing a classroom tyrant, it advocates accepting everybody despite their faults and weaknesses.

Nothing wrong with that, at least as far as Bennett takes it. But nothing historically profound about it, either.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

[e-mail]

THE HISTORY BOYS - Two and one half stars

(R: language, adult situations)

Starring: Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour, Stephen Campbell Moore, Dominic Cooper, Samuel Barnett.

Director: Nicholas Hytner.

Running time: 1 hr. 44 min.

Playing: ArcLight, Hollywood; Monica, Santa Monica.

In a nutshell: The multi-Tony Award-winning play about bright English high-school students and their troubled teachers is too faithfully brought to the screen; its cultural and emotional intelligence remains intact, but a sense of artifice undercuts the whole affair.

CAPTION(S):

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Photo:

Russell Tovey, left, Samuel Anderson, James Corden, Andrew Knott, Dominic Cooper, Samuel Barnett, Jamie Parker and Sacha Dhawan are university-bound British students in ``The History Boys,'' a multiple-Tony-winning play that suffers in its translation to film.