The History Boys.

THE HISTORY BOYS Directed by Nicholas Hytner (Fox Searchlight, 2006)

Following the chalky and romantic trail of Goodbye Mr. Chips, To Sir With Love, and Dead Poets Society, Alan Bennett's sparkling coming-of-age comedy about eight working- and middle-class students prepping for their university exams asks whether learning is meant to prepare us for life or success.

In 1983 the British boys' school where these very adolescent lads are boning up for Oxford's and Cambridge's entrance examinations offers its students two opposing views of education and history. The traditional and romantic notion that a liberal education is meant to enrich young hearts and minds, inflaming them with noble passions and infusing a lifelong love of beauty and learning, is effusively defended by the exuberant middle-aged general studies professor Hector (Richard Griffiths), a chubby and bespectacled Mr. Chips character who seems like a cross between the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Energizer Bunny, and who is given to regular outbursts of iambic pentameter.

The opposing thesis--that we learn to earn, that education is but a set of skills to help us vanquish obstacles and opponents, and that history is merely a catalogue of characters and events that we may endlessly reinterpret and rearrange to our own ends and amusement--is glibly advanced by the school's spanking new history tutor Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore). Being the younger and flashier of the two, Irwin gets many of the film's best lines, while Hector's over-the-top affection for learning can border on the embarrassing.

Still, the movie's heart and sympathies belong to the old-fashioned Mr. Chips. Frances de la Tour does a wonderful turn as Dorothy Lintott, the school's regular history teacher and Hector's sympathetic colleague, and Dominic Cooper (Dakin) and Samuel Barnett (Posner) are strong leads in an exuberant, funny, and fast-talking cast of young men deciphering the past and deciding their future.