Radical is a good thing but there is a lot of it. An inspirational-teacher drama, it’s a dramatisation of events that took place in 2012. Those events became the basis of a 2013 Wired article written by Joshua Davis, this film’s producer. And from there ten years ago to this film in 2023. Meanwhile, the teacher at the centre of the whole thing, Sergio Juárez Correa, works in the José Urbina López Primary School to this day.
Co-writer/director Christopher Zalla makes sure we know where we are and who we’re dealing with. A poor Mexican border town where guns, gangs and poverty grind out any aspiration parents might have for their children. A dad might work scavenging on the giant rubbish heap that dominates the town, while an ever-pregnant mother works night shifts, getting her bright daughter to forsake school to babysit the younger kids.
Into José Urbina López – “un lugar de castigo”, they call it, a place of punishment – comes Signor Correa, an old hand at teaching who’s had a little time off, rethought his strategy and deliberately chosen the worst-performing school in the whole of Mexico to put his new teaching style to the test. Not least because if he fails no one will care.
In classic inspirational-teacher style, Radical follows the unconventional arc of Signor Correa as he dispenses with all teaching formality, rejects teaching to the test and instead tries to tease the curiosity out of his charges, re-igniting a passion for learning that’s been crushed by unimaginative lessons and the wrong sort of discipline.
Also in classic inspirational-teacher style, he hits bumps in the road: resistance from staff members who want to do things the old way; resistance from parents worried about filling their children’s heads with fancy ideas; resistance from the authorities used to an easy life of quiet compliance (and failure).
So some of this film is rote – which considering it’s about rejecting the mechanical is a bit ironic – but there is a lot that isn’t. The performance by Eugenio Derbez, who plays Sr Correa for one, is a thing of dog-eared brilliance, half Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, half Jack Black in School of Rock – inspiring and semi-clueless in equal measure – as a teacher feeling his way into the pockets of his students’ minds that are still receiving information.
And the nuggety stories of some of his pupils. Undiscovered genius Paloma (Jennifer Trejo), the daughter of a rubbish-tip scavenger who wants to be an astronaut but hides her books on the solar system from her father. Or Nico (Danilo Guardiola), the “pretty” sixth grader who will follow his brother into one of the drug gangs unless Sr Correa can rescue him. Or Lupe (Mía Fernanda Solis), who at 12-years-old is borrowing books on philosophy from the local university library but whose prospects for getting out of Dodge are massively constrained.
At the centre of it all, acting as a bellwether indicating how well Correa’s new regime is progressing, is doughy head teacher Chucho (Daniel Haddad), like Derberz’s another performance to induce a wide-beam smile.
This is gang-ridden, dirt-poor Mexico so the chances of a “Captain, my Captain,” moment are vanishingly small, and Zalla and co don’t push the film further than it can plausibly go. There is triumph but also tragedy, on screen and elsewhere. If only this film had been a bit shorter, or had been a little less insistent, or understood better the perils of walking the well-trodden path.
I liked every minute of it, and its quiet juxtaposition of this inspirational-teacher story with other ones, like Dead Poets Society, where brute reality doesn’t play such a decisive role as it does on the Mexican border. I just wish I hadn’t seen it all before.
Radical – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
