Bad Education (not to be confused with Almodovar’s 2004 Spanish movie of the same title) is a fact-based story of a brazen high school embezzlement, which benefits immensely from the casting of its two likable leads, Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney.
Our Grade: B+ (***1/2 out of *****)
Based on Robert Kolker’s New York magazine article, and shot on location around Roslyn, New York, Bad Education is airing on HBO in late April.
Bad Education world premiered at the Toronto Film Fest last September, without a distribution deal in place. Dealing with such timely themes as the interface of affluence, status and power, and college-admissions gamesmanship, the filmmakers expected to find quickly theatrical distribution, but that did not happen.
HBO stepped into the game and acquired the film for $20 million. That decision turned out to be fortuitous as all movie theaters in the U.S. have been shut down since March due to the Covid19 pandemic.
The film is directed by Corey Finley, who made an interesting feature debut in 2017 with Thoroughbreds, a dark comedy thriller starring Olivia Cooke, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Anton Yelchin (in his last screen role). It could be that indie boutiques, such as Focus Features (which released the above feature), feared the risks involved, since Finley’s first movie was a commercial flop, despite favorable critical response.
Bad Education is a more personal and relevant movie than Thoroughbreds, especially for writer Mike Makowsky. The first person Makowsky met there, upon moving to Roslyn with his family as a first-grader (age 6), was Frank A. Tassone, the school’s district superintendent.
Oscar nominee Hugh Jackman, who plays Tassone in the movie, says: “few school administrators make a point of personally assessing the reading level of every incoming student.” Tassone’s ambitious goal, which he fulfilled, was to turn Roslyn into one of the country’s most prestigious school districts.
Hugh Jackman as Frank Tassone in HBO’s “Bad Education.”
Bad Education includes scenes of Tassone studying late at night to memorize the names of his students and their parents. He took the time to help a distraught mother with a learning-challenged son. Ironically, he was the one to push that student reporter to dive deep into her story about the budget.
Jackman notes: “By all accounts, Tassone was a dedicated educator. He built Roslyn into the kind of school that nurtured his creativity and helped usher him into an Ivy League education.” The actor holds that “any person, like Tassone, can actually be two things at once.”
What really attracted Jackman to the project was “the fact that it was true, and that it showed the gray areas of humanity. So obviously in the end a lot of people went to jail and they did something very bad and stole public money, it was a terrible thing, it was the largest theft in school history. But what interested me is that slippery-ness of truth–what started as something small and justifiable, snowballed into $11 million thing. And they somehow they justified it to themselves.”
Does it bother him as an actor that he plays a corrupt man? “Not at all,” says Jackman, “you have to get past that moral judgement, or you can’t take the role. If you can’t get past that, you have to say ‘no thank you.’ Because you have to really fall in love with your character, you have to trust the character, you need to advocate for them in that role.”
There’s no denying that Tassone did something terribly wrong, but Jackman contextualizes the crime in terms of the zeitgeist: “This was a period of time where a great superintendent would mean so much to a community in terms of real estate prices and the position they were being offered, there were actual contracts where people were given two week vacations in Europe in their contract, this was a public school contract. They were being very creative in attracting the top people, and Frank was without a doubt the number one in the country.”
There’s both delusion and self-delusion to the story’s anti-hero, according to Jackman: “Frank was told that it would be totally within his rights, and totally normal if he took $10,000 a month from the ATM machine, because of the amount of work that he was doing. So in his head, he’d be saying, ‘okay, I am the best in the country–he earned a doctorate from Columbia University–and if I went to Wall Street, I’d be earning $20 million a year.”
Jackman elaborates: “When Frank was convicted and someone told him you stole millions, he said, ‘no, no, that’s not true, I stole only one million.’ So he didn’t say oh my God I stole a million, but the one point two was money that he gave back to teachers in forms of you are doing an amazing job, I’m going to send you to Poughkeepsie for the weekend, or here’s a bunch of flowers or he would put on a lobster lunch. In his way, he somehow justified it. And then it just snowballed to a point where he somehow thought he deserved it.”
The movie gets more engaging when a bright student journalist named Rachel (Viswanathan) enters into Tassone’s office for a story about a skywalk the school is planning to construct. She gets some quick quotes, but, strangely, it is Tassone who insists on a more solid piece, when Rachel says that it’s just a puff piece. “It’s only a puff piece if you let it be a puff piece,” he says, unknowingly encouraging her delve into some hidden secrets. What begins as a minor story, initially dismissed by her paper’s editor (Alex Wolff) as a waste of time, gradually snowballs into a full-blown scandalous event, covered by the major media.
There’s a good sense of irony in the movie’s title, as the screenwriter notes: “The best education I ever got was at Roslyn, so it’s kind of funny that the movie is called ‘Bad Education.’”
