Won't Back Down

Most of the muckraking Hollywood movies we think of the classic dramas tend to their sketches in a very clean and satisfactory moral lines. "Norma Rae" was a feisty union organizer fighting for fundamental workers' rights, "All the President's Men" was about two intrepid newspaper reporters reducing a corrupt president, and "Erin Brockovich" was about a heroic ordinary woman fighting corporate crime . "Will not Back Down", a drama about the quasi-disaster that is today the American public education system, would really like a "Norma Rae"-style lump-in-the-throat rabble rouser, and to a good extent the succeed. Yet the film - to his credit - never denies the dark complexities of what went wrong in our schools. 

Won't Back Down

The moral rules are in no way clean and easy to read. Won't Back Down The film rightly pens our educational malaise in many different causes of student stabbing in videogames for bad teachers overly stodgy curriculum to good teachers who have sunk over the years, in a kind of grinding hopelessness that just about everyone in their position can share. The film takes place in Pittsburgh, where Jamie, a financially strapped single mother played by Maggie Gyllenhaal (she works as a bartender and a car-lot secretary), learns that her dyslexic daughter, Malia (Emily Alyn Lind), is stuck in a cul classroom at John Adams, one of the lowest-rated schools in the city. Meet inspired "Will not Back Down" After failing to win a coveted spot in a school lottery (a heartbreaking scene that the film's tone of hope balanced on rickety chances for success suggests) to win, Jamie decides to fight to mount on the school they improve. But it's not because she gives a damn about the fact that a crusader''.'' They act from a pure, desperate, practical desire for her daughter to get a decent education. She works with a gifted but gloomy worn veteran teacher at John Adams, Nona (Viola Davis), who is trying to dig itself out of its own hole of apathy. And together, these two ignite a local movement to re-launch the school with a new, progressive program. They have to jump through a nightmarish series of bureaucratic hoops, the film portrays in excruciating detail. They also have to take on the teachers' Union, represented by Holly Hunter as a manipulative idealist who do not realize how much her own cherished Orthodox have over the years become a part of the problem. "Will not Back Down" has its share in the warmth of the nation's teachers' unions, so let me say up front that the film is not the union demonize as much as it recognizes the point that director Davis Guggenheim powerful in his 2010 documentary Waiting for '' Superman'': that what the union stands now - among others, many of them well - is a lack of change. And "Will not Back Down", says what your feelings on the subject, lack of change can not the answer to our public education crisis. T rying an informative presentation and a vintage-inspired awards bait weeper cram in a movie, "Will not Back Down" is sometimes clumsy, but it is also passionate in a surprisingly clever way. It makes a real drama of impossible things.Won't Back Down It is also for most cases very well acted. Gyllenhaal brings perhaps a little too much movie-star-as-working-class mom look to her role, but she also makes you feel the pain of what Jamie is up against: the terror that her daughter will be doomed from grade school . Marianne Jean-Baptiste, as the chief school administrator Pittsburgh, makes a sharp and witty turn as an icy bureaucrat who is still a trail of fire in its belly, and Viola Davis, in a brilliant performance felt and thought, makes by nona runs contained, enraged, depressed, and stubborn point. Davis goes beyond noble-educator hypocrisy to show you the tug-of-war between devotion and despair that now defines too many of our teachers. "Will not Back Down" digs into such a complicated, no-easy solution subject that I doubt the film will attract a very large audience, despite the real rouser of a climactic scene set at a school board meeting. Yet actually goes one step further than many current dramas Hollywood by leaving you with something real