Cliches, melodrama overthrow 'Emperor'
By Nicole Rodriguez
"How will history remember you?" Kevin Kline asks of a classroom full of students in the new Universal Pictures Release "The Emperor's Club." The question, which is displayed prominently in the film's trailer, is meant to give the target audience the impression that this film is deep and thought-provoking. Sadly, "Club" doesn't even come close to living up to these first impressions.
Kline plays William Hundert, a passionate classics professor at a posh all-boy boarding school reminiscent of that seen in 1989's "Dead Poets Society." The story centers on the arrival of Sedgewick Bell (Emile Hirsch of "The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys") in the early 1970s. Sedgeweck is a spoiled, self-centered son of a senator who prides himself on his ability to stir up mischief and hide from punishment behind his father's bank account.
Sure that he can reach the student behind the pranks, William dedicates his career toward helping Sedgewick reach his academic potential. Only the road to achieving this goal isn't as smooth as William originally thinks, and he finds that his experiences with Sedgewick continue to haunt him twenty-five years later.
Although the film's performances (those by Kline and Hirsch, in particular) are quite impressive, "The Emperor's Club" never manages to live up to its pre-release hype. Screenwriter Neil Tolkin, who's last project was the Pauly Shore flop "Jury Duty," provides the actors with lines that are as sappy as they are forgettable. He's trying so hard to recreate "Dead Poets Society" that he fails to realize the one thing that made "Society" successful was its ability to be simultaneously touching and honest without ever becoming melodramatic and overly-sentimental. "Club," on the other hand, is only the latter two.
The characters in this film are bland and one-dimensional, as though the writers have taken every cliche from the troubled student to the dedicated professor and jam-packed them into a two-hour vehicle.
It is, in fact, the actors alone who make this story somewhat bearable. Hirsch does a decent job as the troublemaking Sedgewick, but this is hardly a star making performance. All he has to do is smile wickedly and flip through a few Playboys and his role is done. His performance is nowhere near as memorable as those exhibited by Robert Sean Leonard and Ethan Hawke in "Society." Not that this is entirely Hirsch's fault - he was never given the opportunity to portray an interesting character or show any type of dimension. Tolkin and director Michael Hoffman ("One Fine Day") are mainly to blame for this.
As written, the main character of William Hundert is boring and self-righteous. He would have been the type of professor all students dread rather than the type they idolize. It is solely Kline's charismatic performance that makes the character even moderately likable and allows the audience to believe that his 15-year-old students might actually be engaged by his lectures on Aristotle, rather than sleeping through them. Kline should be given an Oscar just for making a vaguely interesting character out of such ridiculously unoriginal material.
Should anyone involved in this film be asked the question William continuously poses to his students, the answer would certainly not be this film. History will certainly not remember "The Emperor's Club" and neither will audiences.