Joyce Glasser reviews Radical (August 9, 2024) Cert. 12A, 122 minutes,
What is radical in Christopher Zalla’s second feature is the teaching method employed by an unlikely sixth grade teacher in an unlikely Mexican city. The class results were striking and one student achieved the highest score in mathematics in the entire country. This attracted the attention of Wired Magazine journalist Joshua Davis whose article A Radical Way of Unleashing a Generation of Geniuses inspired the film.
Zalla’s film itself, while uplifting and often thrilling, feels formulaic and is predictable. To some extent, it’s the nature of the beast. Inspirational teacher films, including The Holdovers, The Dead Poets’ Society, To Sir with Love, and Blackboard Jungle are a mini-genre in themselves.
Matamoros, Mexico might be on the tourist map with its colonial architecture and sandy beaches along the Gulf of Mexico, but the families of students attending the Jose Urbina Lopez Elementary live in abject poverty on fetid streets in dilapidated hovels, surrounded by powerful drug cartels. Those children who are not apprenticed to the cartels, must work elsewhere to help out their largely uneducated families.
Expectations are, as usual, low as the unenthusiastic teachers start the new 2011-2012 terms with a pep talk from corpulent principal Chucho (Daniel Haddad). He informs the audience more so than the teachers that the school is at the bottom of the league tables based on the annual ENLACE test, and half the six-graders never progress to middle school. A cash incentive has been approved if targets are met.
That bonus seems all the more unobtainable when Chucho announces a new, local teacher has been hired to replace one who left. Natural Science teacher Sergio Juarez Carrea (Eugenio Derbez) had a breakdown at his previous school but was reinvigorated by a YouTube video he saw espousing a radical approach to teaching. Sergio is not present to meet his colleagues. He is busy turning his classroom into a disguised math’s lesson.
Meanwhile, the students are ordered to queue up in silence and obey the teacher. Then they meet Sergio, who believes children should be in charge of their own learning, on their own terms.
For their first lesson on fractions, the desks have become overturned boats. The floor is the ocean. There are 23 students and only six boats. Those who don’t get in a boat will drown. But if any boat has more passengers than the others, it will sink. Although Sergio gives little hints, rather than spoon feed the baffled class the answers, he tells them they have the potential to solve the problem.
Sergio challenges the children to find the answer to this, and several other problems that will also consume the viewer. The way in which the children’s natural curiosity, competitive natures, and newfound self-belief motivate them is exhilarating.
Zalla gets the viewer involved because we are as eager to solve the problems as are the students, and equally curious to see how they come up with the answer. We see how the main characters recognise the principles at work while going about their daily chores and activities.
But there are stronger forces against this endeavour than 12-year-olds programmed for failure who have never owned a book or had access to libraries or computers.
Cute little Lupe (Mia Fernanda Solis), for instance, watches as her single mother is bed-ridden by a new pregnancy, leaving Lupe to care for her two toddler siblings. Her mother threatens to pull Lupe out of school to care for the three siblings so that she can return to work. Lupe, encouraged by Sergio to look into philosophy, wonders what John Stuart Mills would make of the moral dilemma troubling her.
Zalla shows us the various cycles the children will be sucked into unless they can break out. Handsome Nico, (Danilo Guardiola) in awe of motor-cycling macho Chepe (Víctor Estrada), can’t wait to join the cartel so people will respect him. When Sergio builds up Nico’s self-confidence and unlocks his potential, he changes his mind. But is it too late?
Paloma (Jennifer Trejo) lives with her sickly father next to the junk heap he farms for metal to sell to a cheating dealer. She hunts for books on aerospace, inspired by the technological developments in Brownsville, Texas, across the Rio Grande. Her father, who fears his daughter’s fantasy dreams are at odds with the reality of her life, burns the one he finds. But after Paloma’s quick mental calculations enable her to catch the metal dealer cheating, and a telescope, believed to have been discarded turns out to have been home-made, he is overwhelmed with wonder.
Sergio faces obstacles, too, which threaten to derail his project. Derbez, the film’s superstar and producer is best known to us for his roles in Coda and Overboard, and he’s great here, too. In contrast to the corrupt school officials and morally compromised teachers, however, his character becomes a saint, and his holier-than-thou, condescending attitude to the adults detracts from his cool heroism.
One of the strengths of the film, which is based on true events, is that not all of the children we are rooting for can break out of the cycle. But for one, who ends up on the cover of Wired Magazine with the headline, ‘The Next Steve Jobs?’ radical methods bear fruit.
