The drama of teaching and the recent past.

THE HISTORY BOYS, according to Miranda Devine (Sydney Morning Herald, June 4), "is a fraud. It is a pederastic fantasy about teachers who fondle their students' genitals in the nicest way and the boys don't mind at all. It's about a British boys' school in the nineteen eighties where all the students are openly or latently gay."

Bad enough, but her real complaint appears to be "that the movie's true nature has been hidden so successfully that people are mistaking it for family fare", with her real target the censors who gave the film an M rating--the same as Spiderman III and Harry Potter. She describes encountering a family friend "reeling out of a suburban theatre with his wife and two pre-teen children" when the straight boy Dakin asks his teacher Irwin "is there any chance of your sucking me off".

Ms Devine's friend felt he had been deceived by the M rating into taking his children to a grossly unsuitable film. Which is, of course, ludicrous. The M rating means the film is unsuitable for anyone under fifteen. Any teacher who showed The History Boys to primary or junior secondary students could be severely disciplined.

As for Hector's pathetic groping of his students, it is never condoned. The boys "don't mind" because they get so much more from him as mentor and teacher, but it is condemned:

Hector: I didn't actually do anything. It was a laying on of hands ... but more in benediction than gratification ...

Mrs Lintott: ... that is the most colossal balls ... A grope is a grope. It is not the Annunciation, you twerp.

Alan Bennett underscored this for the film version by writing a different last speech for Posner--the one openly homosexual boy in the class. It comes in the final scene when we find out what became of everyone:

Posner." Slightly to my surprise I ended up ... a teacher. I'm a bit of a stock figure ... I do a wonderful school play ... and though I never touch the boys, it's always a struggle, but maybe that's why I'm a good teacher ...

As an educator I was privileged to have some Posners as colleagues and friends--men of scrupulous integrity who did indeed love their students but never exploited that relationship. As for The History Boys being a pederastic fantasy; as Mrs Lintott says, "Balls". Apart from anything else the "boys" are all over the age of consent. And the way everyone except the loathsome headmaster (who is given the film's one gay-bashing speech) accepts bisexuality and homosexuality may be idealised, but these sort of ideals are fundamental to any society that regards itself as civilised.

Ms Devine's misreading of the film is especially dangerous because The History Boys is one of the best films about teaching we have seen. There have, of course, been many fine movies set in schools but rarely have they portrayed good teaching. Robin Williams' schoolmaster in Dead Poets' Society is supposed to be inspirational--"seize the day, boys"--but all we see is showmanship. Goodbye Mr Chips is good on the vocation of teaching, but Robert Donat's Chips is never shown discussing a Latin text in any depth.

In fact films have excelled more at portraying truly deplorable teaching than providing believable positive examples. There is Miss Jean Brodie's exhibitionism, played with just the fight note of phony theatricality by Maggie Smith, and the stultifying boredom of Crocker-Harris's Greek lessons in The Browning Version. (Michael Redgrave always insisted he drew very little from his own teaching for the part--just wearing the gown and seeming to ignore the class--which makes his superlative performance the more remarkable.) For the 1994 remake Ronald Harwood wrote a brilliant teaching scene for Albert Finney in which we are allowed a glimpse of Crocker-Harris's real ability. It is an exposition of a Greek text that for once the old teacher brings alive for his class--so good as method that I adopted the same approach to revise Hamlet for an HSC student who was to sit for his English paper a few days later (he did very well). But on the whole, good teaching is described rather than portrayed in the cinema.

The History Boys, however, has at its heart an extraordinary scene between Hector (Richard Griffiths) and Posner (Samuel Barnett) where Thomas Hardy's poem "Drummer Hodge" is explored by teacher and pupil. In the play the scene came at the end of the first act and comes at about the same place in the film. According to Nicholas Hytner, who directed both the film and stage versions, "Freed from the necessity of including nine hundred people nightly into their conversation these two marvellous actors played only for each other and allowed the camera the most intimate imaginable access to a profoundly felt loneliness." Hytner and cinematographer Andrew Dunn cover the scene in unostentatious medium shots and leave the rest to the performers. I won't quote the script here. It is worth reading for what it says about the use of history and discrimination to understand great literature, but it should be experienced first through Griffiths' and Barnett's marvellously unguarded embodiment of the characters.

This kind of teaching is the antithesis of the outcomes-based curriculum imposed on students in New South Wales and, it seems, in the UK. It is, as the headmaster in the film complains, unquantifiable, as all good teaching should be. To dictate what anyone should find in literature and history is intellectual totalitarianism.

Essentially the film/play is about two kinds of teaching, neither of which is totalitarian: the imparting of knowledge for its own sake, represented by Hector, and the use of a kind of rhetoric combined with "gobbets" of information to impress the examiners, represented by Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), the teacher just out of university who the headmaster imports to give the boys the "edge" to get to Oxford or Cambridge. Here it would have been easy for Bennett to have loaded the dice and made Irwin an arrogant twerp and Hector the true scholar. But although we like Hector he is at times intellectually self-indulgent, while Irwin may be showing the boys how to "cheat" but soon realises he is using what Hector and their real History teacher, Mrs Lintott (Frances de la Tour) have given them. Irwin is also gentle and vulnerable and he is not always wrong; as in this exchange:

Scripps: To you the Holocaust is just another topic on which we may get a question.

Irwin: No. But this is history. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. We don't see it and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past and one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be ... even on the Holocaust.

Perhaps because it would have added one complication too many Hytner cuts the scene describing the indignant complaints of Posner's Jewish parents at this "distancing". He was almost certainly right. The issue of whether there is any place for the sensibilities of participants in arriving at historical truth really belongs elsewhere.

The History Boys is a disturbing film for anyone like myself who taught in schools and colleges in the sixties and seventies. One friend told me I was "in it"; meaning I was Hector. And yes, when I wrote my own courses I did pursue knowledge for its own sake. Consequentially essays required for evaluation were an extension of discussions with the students about the subject. But as a young teacher I was also Irwin, using recent discoveries, gleaned from my university lecture notes and the latest articles, to get my students good marks in the public examinations. Were we--and there were many of us--sacrificing learning for good results? Sometimes--but there was of course our responsibility to ensure that our students got into tertiary institutions where they could pursue their careers--the old dilemma.

Alan Bennett makes the conflict more dramatic by implying that seeking places at Oxford or Cambridge because of the prestige is "meretricious" and gives his characters a stylish Bennett-speak that makes them far more self-aware than they could ever have been in reality. In the play the characters are given asides to the audience commenting on the action. For the film Hytner retains the original's theatricality (his models were the screen adaptations of The Front Page and The Philadelphia Story) but cut these direct asides. This together with glimpses of the boys' families and some limited "opening out" (confined to events described in the play) give the work a fluidity and credibility missing, I suspect, on stage. Performances by the original National Theatre cast are predictably superb and the issues about history, not to mention teaching itself, are all the more powerful because they come out of the mouths of believable human beings. And one of The History Boys' most impressive achievements is the work's life-affirming acceptance of the varieties of sexual experience--an achievement so grossly misrepresented by Ms Devine.

UNDERSTANDABLY ALAN BENNETT does not examine the heavy price historians sometimes have to pay in order to construct their narratives. It is not one I have as yet had to pay myself, although when I was examining Damien Parer's footage showing the aftermath of the Japanese massacre of the Chamorro workers on Guam, I did have a few nightmares. Perhaps what spared me was Parer's evocation of Christian art to portray the horror. I also must confess to the occasional withdrawal. I didn't probe too deeply about the atrocities witnessed by so many of the soldiers I interviewed, and which continued to haunt them. One who did not hold back in this way was the writer, and in my opinion historian, Truman Capote.

The story of the writing of his "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood was first told on film in Capote (reviewed in the May 2006 issue of Quadrant). Certainly the film was hardly a biography of the writer. Author of the screenplay Dan Futterman and director Bennett Miller concentrated on Capote's time in Kansas investigating the background to the Clutter family killings, and what they saw as the famous writer's exploitation of the two murderers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith.

As Capote did with the book when he created a narrative based on his and Nelle Harper Lee's research but omitted any reference to how they collected their material, the film-makers more or less ignored Capote's other life as a New York celebrity and concentrated on his interaction with first the Clutters' neighbours in Holcomb. It made for the kind of arthouse cinema--measured pace, lingering shots of the high plains wheat fields of western Kansas (actually Winnipeg in Canada)--beloved by certain kinds of critics and directors of film festivals but for me subtly false.

They also clearly disliked Capote. Philip Seymour Hoffman's much-praised impersonation is ice-cold, and without any justification the film includes Kenneth Tynan's accusation that Capote failed to get the clearly insane killers adequate legal representation. It was, of course, refuted at the time and quite devastatingly; just read the exchanges between Tynan, Capote and one of the murderers' lawyers in Tynan Right and Left. But despite this, Futterman's script shows Capote getting them a lawyer then withdrawing his support when it looks as though a commutation of the death penalty will spoil his book.

For the moment it seems this dishonest travesty is spoiling the reception of Paul McGrath's Infamous, in every way a far more satisfactory treatment of Capote himself and the creation of his masterpiece. The film is based on a very different kind of work from that of its predecessor. Capote used Gerald Clarke's "definitive" biography. In famous adapts George Plimpton's Truman Capote." In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career, a book that makes no judgments, leaving readers to make up their own minds. This influenced writer-director Douglas McGrath to include "interviews" to camera by Truman's friends, and in one instance enemy--Gore Vidal. (McGrath uses the very Vidal quip that Capote's famous high voice was like a brussels sprout might sound supposing it could speak.) These testimonials given by the actors in character allow McGrath to include quite naturally a great deal of straight exposition and even, as with Capote's insistence that Perry Smith apologised on the scaffold, investigator Alvin Dewey's assertion that the killer in fact remained silent.

Infamous opens with an invented scene where a "well known singer" of the period is so affected by "What is This Thing Called Love?" that she breaks down, speaking the lyrics in a whisper. The band falls silent, then pulling herself together she calls in the musicians with a finger snap, and completes the song. As the singer is hauntingly played by Gywneth Paltrow, the scene resonates throughout the film, a metaphor for Capote's experience.

McGrath cuts between the high life in New York with Capote being taught the twist by Babe Paley (a superbly regal Sigourney Weaver) and Slim Keith (Hope Davis) and the writer's investigation of the murder victims' friends and neighbours. Here the interaction with Sandra Bullock's warmly likeable Nelle Harper Lee works much better than it did in the earlier film. There she is portrayed, along with just about everyone else, as disapproving of Capote. Here you really believe they were lifelong friends, squabbling good-naturedly about how much invention there should be in a non-fiction novel and deftly co-operating as they win over Jeff Daniels' stalwart Alvin Dewey, when the pair are invited to Christmas dinner by his wife. (In reality the breakthrough came when Capote and Lee spent Christmas with another leading citizen, but they really did make friends with the Deweys.)

British actor Toby Jones is so good that he seems to be channelling Capote (according to McGrath "he worked like a sculptor, learning every detail, every mannerism for months"). He was, of course, helped immeasurably by being as diminutive as the real Capote. Equally good is Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee. McGrath explains the character was the author of To Kill a Mockingbird--to get Lee's voice he read and reread the book.

The sequences where to complete In Cold Blood Capote has to win the confidence of the murderers are infinitely darker and more complex than in the earlier film. The writer's involvement with Perry Smith (Daniel Craig) is portrayed as destructively intimate--a dark love story. At first his interviews with Hickock and Smith are manipulative, then Capote discovers that he and Smith both came from broken families. All this is well documented. Did the writer and the killer fall in love, as they do in the film? McGrath admits he can't prove it, but Capote did tell friends there was a sexual encounter. Certainly it makes compelling drama, with Jones and Craig reaching a level of intensity that does indeed evoke pity and terror. The executions too are shown as far more appalling than in either the film version of In Cold Blood or Capote. McGrath includes the sickening fall through the trapdoor, the fifteen-minute wait until the victim is pronounced dead, and Capote running out to vomit. All of which is based on the writer's later accounts and helps to explain his inability to write another major work.

Infamous works as well as it does largely because of the superbly achieved contrast between the murders in the Mid-West and life as Capote lived it in New York. Light and shade always work and almost invariably heighten tragedy. The film is, as McGrath freely admits, historical fiction but it honestly portrays the problems all reporters face in writing about the recent past. Re-enacting the thoughts of anyone whose experiences encompass evil is dangerous, especially for a damaged man like Capote; and in portraying the great writer's experience with such understanding and compassion McGrath has created a work that equals In Cold Blood itself.

Neil McDonald writes: I am grateful to Noel Purdon for making available his interview with Paul McGrath and for sharing his insights into Capote.