Dead Poets Society (1989)

A group of students from the country’s most prestigious boarding school forms a secret poetry society after meeting their eccentric but inspiring teacher, Mr Keating.

What makes Dead Poets Society such a memorable film? Peter Weir’s directing? Tom Schulman’s writing? Robin Williams and his teaching of “Carpe Diem”? Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, and the rest of the gang?

Dead Poets Society will always be a classic due to the aforementioned reasons individually and collectively, but for so much more. If you ask ten people what the film is about, you’ll probably receive eleven different answers. Is it about poetry and its meaning? About questioning authority? Consequences? About parents who have kids only to tell them what to do and how to do it so they can feel “big”? Is it about love? How about seizing the day as the first step to pursuing your life’s dream?

The “O Captain! My Captain!” scene is the film’s narrative epiphany. Every step and every risk those kids take is meant to lead to that moment. However, how you perceive the film until then and what the film means to you until then will evoke different emotions inside you. It might be seen as a “white-rich-boys-problems” movie nowadays, but for a couple of hours, pretend it’s you in that age and wonder what your dream was back then, how hard you tried to achieve it, and, ultimately, where you are now.

It is not a Christmas film, but at this time of year, I always flash back to inspiring films that made me fall in love with cinema as a kid. A film like this does not need my review – it is just a reminder that it still exists and inspires.

P.S. “O Captain! My Captain!” was sorely remembered again by the media in 2014 amidst the unfortunate death of the acting giant Robin Williams.

P.P.S. Robert Sean Leonard, the leading actor (next to Christian Bale) in another favourite film of mine while growing up, Swing Kids (1993), never became the A-list actor he deserved to be like Bale and Hawke did. Shame really…

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