Teacher films like Matilda, Mr. Holland’s Opus or Dead Poet’s Society have made audiences come to expect this narrative of incredibly supportive and inspirational educators. Julia Hart’s Miss Stevens circumvents this cliché and turns it on its head, depicting its titular educator as a woman with little control over her life. Thankfully, though, Hart does not set up this story so that Lily Rabe’s Miss Stevens necessarily learns from her students. Instead, she and her charges recognize their shared troubles and empathize with each other more than reach any tangible solutions. And that in itself is very true to life.
A quintessentially small indie film, Miss Stevens follows the English teacher and three of her students on a weekend trip to a young dramatists competition. There’s the organized Margot (Lili Reinhart) who is singlehandedly responsible for organizing the trip and funding it, the brooding loner Billy (Timothee Chalamet) and the isolated Sam (Anthony Quintal) looking to make friends and meet someone. Of the three, Sam is the least fleshed-out character, reduced as he is to little more than a gay stereotype. The central dynamic here is that between Stevens and Billy, the quiet, under-performing student with immense potential. When they set out on the highway in Stevens’ barely road-worthy hatchback, it’s immediately clear that Billy commiserates with and admires his teacher; it’s just a question of whether that admiration extends to romantic desire.
For her part, Miss Stevens’s life is at a standstill. Her mother’s recent death still weighs heavily on her, and the script (co-written by Hart and Jordan Horowitz) uses that as her main characterization but never in a heavy-handed way. Hart opens the film with Stevens frozen in the auditorium of the local playhouse – remembering her mother’s former acting days – only to be startled by an usher asking, “Are you waiting for someone?” The implication is that Stevens is stagnating, and the narrative expectation is that someone will come along to pull her out of this rut. That someone isn’t a fellow (married) teacher at the drama competition (Rob Huebel), but Billy, the kid who wholeheartedly sings America’s “Sister Golden Hair” with her, foregoes rehearsals to go with her to replace her car tire and looks at her with the recognition of someone who faces equal amounts of emotional turmoil.
Hart could take this in the direction of a teacher-student affair but doesn’t. The connection between Stevens and Billy, instead, earns its narrative payoff by developing a sincere relationship founded on mutual emotional vulnerability. There’s one scene in Stevens’s hotel room that shows us just how easily this relationship could evolve into something more, but a well-timed interruption by Margot and Sam puts an end to it. While Billy’s character does bear the signs of one meant solely to reinforce Stevens’s worth and self-confidence, he doles out his wise-beyond-his-years advice as only a teenager can: jumping up and down on a bed repeating “Don’t be sad!” And, as befits her character, Stevens’s advice for Billy, who has stopped taking his medication, is minimally helpful. She’s in no place to give world-altering life advice, but she at least tells him he should talk to his parents if he is unhappy.
With Miss Stevens, Hart very plainly deals in clichéd catharsis but brings enough realism to the piece to prevent it from devolving into inspirational pap. The success of the script relies on the chemistry between Stevens and Billy, and Rabe’s performance is supremely understated, balancing emotional fragility and somewhat unwanted responsibility to perfection. And her counterpart, the up and coming Chalamet, plays his lost boy role with a James Dean-esque intensity and gloominess.
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