‘The Emperor’s Club’ riddle: Do uplifting movies matter at all?

Reviews of the new Kevin Kline film, “The Emperor’s Club,” have been lukewarm, marking off points for its old-fashioned style and theme, some wondering why anyone should care about its musty world of privileged boys studying for their upcoming roles in the ruling class. Based on a short story by Ethan Canin, “The Emperor’s Club” is a morality tale about a prep school history teacher whose mastery in the classroom is challenged by one of his students, the callous, ambitious son of a U.S. senator.

The film makes a case for the enduring influence of a great teacher like Kline’s Mr. Hundert even as it contrasts his cloistered idealism with the real-world success skills of the senator’s son, who slinks through a dismal and dishonorable academic career before amassing a fortune in business as a prelude to running for office himself.

It’s a story about the beauty of erudition and the exercise of power, and how the two things are unrelated at schools and in the world beyond. It’s also about ethics and character and the value of ancient history and maybe a few other things, and the fact that it’s about anything (besides good guys killing bad guys or trying to get a date) raises its sights above the average Hollywood studio picture.

Yet even as I noted its unfashionably quiet tone and serious intentions, watching “The Emperor’s Club” reminded me that Hollywood, despite its low reputation among intellectuals, has over the years produced, along with all the James Bond films, teen sex comedies, sadistic thrillers and “Jackass,” its share of thought-provoking and truthful films about ethics and history, social issues and justice, political corruption and war. Their lasting beneficial effect on society has been close to zero. And I don’t understand this.

How is it that art, especially the most popular art, can be so impotent? It may be naive to look for a link between art and social improvement, but inside a theater I’m willing to give way to such naivete, at least for two hours. Watching “The Emperor’s Club,” I allowed myself the illusion that a story examining character and its importance might change the way people think about the value of teachers and how wrong it is when the good ones are passed over for promotions in favor of brazen careerists and public relations types.

It’s all there in “The Emperor’s Club,” textbook case, the writing on the wall, the sorry way the world works. And I want to believe that after a few million people see this film, those in charge will be shamed into changing the way they behave and it will only be a matter of time before teachers’ salaries across the nation are doubled and deceitful politicians voted out of office, virtue restored, and, you know, hooray for Hollywood, after all. Aren’t stories powerful and great!

I know that none of this will happen. That’s life in the real world, especially a world where a story like this doesn’t even attract favorable attention from many critics, let alone the kids in the mall.

But still, I wonder, if a culture is measured to some degree by the content of its stories and myths, do we conclude, then, that we are living through a time when many of our best stories, even those reaching the high visibility of a major studio film, are truly marginal and disconnected from the culture at large? Or has it always been thus?

“It’s like Mr. Hundert’s position as a teacher,” says Michael Hoffman, who directed “The Emperor’s Club.” “You dedicate yourself to something you think is important even though you know the world is a cold, dark place. You know going in that it’s not going to connect with everyone.”

The people who made “The Emperor’s Club” say they have been heartened by testimonials provided by some middle-aged viewers who, after seeing the film, have said they wanted to take up or go back to teaching, while at the same time they were surprised to learn that younger audience members were not so concerned by the pivotal moment in the story when Sedgewick Bell, the senator’s son (played by Emile Hirsch), cheats. If true, that would seem to be evidence of a new generation gap and suggest our society is seriously split over core values informing films in the first place. Is it possible that Dustin Hoffman’s famous eye-glazing recoil at the word “plastics” in “The Graduate” plays differently today to audiences in which the children of Benjamin Braddock are searching in earnest for the next venture capital idea rather than questioning the presumptions of affluence as he did?

Maybe the anti-establishment heroes of the ‘60s indeed are long passe, along with the quaint notion of downsizing cars to help economize on diminishing fossil fuels, but Hollywood has not led the way with romantic portraits of corporate greed and monopoly, has it? Instead we have had “Erin Brockovich,” “The Insider,” “Silkwood,” “The China Syndrome,” “Class Action,” “The Truman Show,” “Wall Street” and many more depicting the corporation as a corrupting, anti-social force. Yet the counter mythology supplied mainly by advertising, I suppose, has maintained the benevolent images of multinational brands and franchises.

As the nation hurtles toward war in Iraq, with Congress backing a U.S.-led military overthrow of Saddam Hussein, you could raise the question, was “Born on the Fourth of July” that long ago? Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning adaptation of paralyzed Vietnam vet Ron Kovic’s searing account of how the terrible reality of combat made cruel mockery of his childlike view of war and patriotism provided all the big screen evidence a young recruit would ever need to think twice about rushing around the world to kick butt for the red, white and blue. You can still rent it, along with “Platoon,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Gallipoli,” “Three Kings,” “Paths of Glory,” and “All Quiet on the Western Front.” How is it that so much evidence of madness and brutality has not stuck to the public mind?

“The Emperor’s Club” is hardly the first good movie about a noble, embattled teacher. “Stand and Deliver” in 1988 made a folk hero of Garfield High’s charismatic calculus instructor Jaime Escalante to the extent we might have thought studio chiefs themselves would soon be quitting their jobs to follow his example. But what lasting reforms did the film inspire? The more recent “Mr. Holland’s Opus” and “Music of the Heart” argued dramatically for sustaining music education in the public schools. Is that happening?

I called a real teacher, a professor of American history at a large, well-known university, and asked him if he had any idea why so many popular stories about history and social issues seem to have so little impact. He quoted Philip Caputo to me, from Caputo’s Vietnam memoir “A Rumor of War,” something along the lines of: “We had read our Wilfred Owen, but every generation is doomed to learn the lessons of war on its own.

“I’m in my 26th year of teaching, and I am struck by how little my students pick up on the points I’m trying to make. I feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football” in the comic strip “Peanuts,” recalling the image when Lucy always pulls the ball away at the last second. “Every fall I trot back out there full of hope and optimism and end up swinging at air.”

So perhaps the answer to my question, although it sounds too easy, is that not enough people are really paying attention for movies to matter. The good ones come and go just like the bad ones, ringing up profits at the box office or not, but soon sinking back into the ocean of sensation that washes the beach clean tomorrow.

The producer of “The Emperor’s Club,” Mark Abraham, not surprisingly believes the stories are worth telling nonetheless. “Even if we don’t know we’re taking the beach, we still have to keep fighting,” he says. “There’s a Don Quixote in all of us. And if just a few people take the meaning of a movie to heart, that’s the seed of change.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley, a Romantic, once wrote: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” an idea that is said to have originated with Plato. Mr. Hundert, I’m sure, knew the quotation and may have even believed it. If I’d taken his class, maybe he could have convinced me it was true.