Film Review – Radical (2023)

The inspirational teacher. It’s a movie standard: Dead Poets’ Society, To Sir With Love, even School Of Rock all come to mind and there are many more than you could fit into an average sized classroom. The setting’s familiar and the potential stories numerous. In truth, there isn’t anything especially innovative in the latest addition to the genre, Radical, the winner of the Audience Award at last year’s Sundance. But what you will see is a warm, uplifting film made with care and skill and one that’s unafraid to look the social issues inherent in its story straight in the eye.

Inspired by the true story of teacher Sergio Juarez Correa (Eugenio Derbez), the new member of staff at the Jose Urbina Lopez Elementary in run-down Mexican border town, Matamoros, it tells the story of how he brought a whole new style of teaching to a school that had essentially been written off. Languishing at the bottom of the league table, nobody will spend money on it and the children are all expected to do badly in their final exams. Correa throws the rule book out of the window, along with the syllabus, replacing the pupils’ apathy with curiosity, independence of thought and a hunger to explore their potential, talent and intelligence. And, even though the realities of life in the neglected town never go away, the result is inspiration, discovery and, most importantly, hope.

Some of the kids’ circumstances are heart-breaking: one lives with her father next to the town dump, where they sift through the rubbish for anything they can sell, another faces having to leave school because her mother is about to give birth for the fourth time and needs her daughter to babysit, and a third is being sucked into a life of drug dealing. They’re all highly intelligent, but life seems to want to stand in the way of them achieving anything more than repeating their parents’ lives. Despite the inspirational tone in the classroom, the threat of violence is never far away and early on the sound of bullets comes a little too close to the school. Fast forward to the latter third of the film and those sounds are repeated, with the guns blasting into the children’s lives and giving the film a more sombre, downbeat tone.

Correa’s unconventional teaching style is just as much an experiment for him as it is for the school and his class. In reality, he’s flying by the seat of his pants and, as played by Eugenio Derbez, his energy leaps off the screen and his connection with the children is tangible. He’s a very different proposition to the equally inspirational teacher also played by Derbez in CODA, another Sundance Audience Award winner, to say nothing of its Oscars. The classroom scenes, where the youngsters are encouraged to think for themselves, make you wish you’d had at least one teacher just like Correa. And they’re also a commentary – an indictment, even – of education systems which place too much emphasis on grades and league tables.

It’s a crowd-pleaser for sure, but Radical sets out to do more: to show there can still be hope in face of crushing poverty and adversity, that following the rules isn’t always the right thing to do and that we all have the capacity to think for ourselves. And that education is a right, not a privilege.

★★★★

In UK cinemas from 9 August / Eugenio Derbez, Gilberto Barazza, Enoc Leano, Jennifer Trejo, Danilo Guardiola, Mia Fernandez Solis / Dir: Christopher Zalla / Altitude Films / 12A