Teaching Mrs. Tingle

TEACHING MRS. TINGLE (1999)

We've all had a bad teacher or even several; and some of us have even had the Bad Teacher, the parent stand-in from whom we crave respect and get nothing but careless contempt, misdirected from their lousy job straight to you. How, then, did writer-director Kevin Williamson get everything so wrong?

Nickel Tour: Mrs. Tingle (Helen Mirren) is the nightmare version of a bad teacher we've all had. Poor brilliant student Lee Ann (Katie Holmes), wannabe starlet Jo Lynn (Marisa Coughlan), and good-looking tough guy going nowhere fast Luke (Barry Watson) are the generic stereotypes that maybe some melodramatic teen see themselves as, but are certainly as attractive as any teenager desperately wishes to be. When Lee Ann's one shot at getting a scholarship and going to college are threatened by Mrs. Tingle's deliberate misinterpretation of catching the trio with a photocopy of the final exam, there's little choice but to go to Mrs. Tingle's house and try to convince her not to destroy Lee Ann. One misapplied crossbow bolt later, the students have their teacher knocked out at their feet and a desperate need to somehow make the impossible situation right.

Teaching Mrs. Tingle opened to reviews that were, at their most generous, utterly brutal. I figured that there were several possible reasons for this: for example, movie critics will sometimes gang up on a movie that they know is doomed for no other reason than releasing the bile they've stored up praising second-rate movies for generous perks or payola. It was also way past time for the Kevin Williamson backlash, after being adulated and promoted to near-star status with the success of Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Dawson's Creek.

Now, I have a horrible confession: I watched the second season of Dawson's Creek. Somehow my Katie Holmes crush, like an inexplicable outburst of eczema, blossomed fully. But it should be said that the second season of Dawson's Creek, by being unbelievably uneven, afraid to commit or follow through on anything it put forth, kind of reminded me of what it was like to be a teenager--where things veer wildly from one melodramatic high-drama tragedy to another.

One of the storylines that year had to do underachiever Pacey butting heads with a cruel and condescending teacher. Williamson, in various articles, had talked about a defining tragedy of his own life being a dismissive teacher who casually crushed Williamson's confidence as a writer and how it took years to recover. Whether Williamson wrote the scenes himself, was able to get someone on his staff to do it (or through some very good acting on the part of Joshua Jackson), the scenes on Dawson's Creek smoldered with anger, indignation and cathartic righteousness.

It gave me hope that the critics had been wrong about Teaching Mrs. Tingle, that maybe Williamson had created something so dark and painful the critics took a strong disliking to it. Besides, Katie Holmes was going to be in her bra making out with some guy. How bad could it be?

Well, let me tell you. And this is from someone who, while not the world's biggest fan, can cut Kevin Williamson a fair amount of slack: Teaching Mrs. Tingle is an awful, lousy, and downright dull movie. To iterate everything wrong with it would take more time than it did to watch it, so let me just hit the highlights.

First, the script is lousy; just downright awful. My guess is it was originally something much darker (and closer in tone to its unacknowledged source material, Lois Duncan's young adult novel, Killing Mr. Griffin) before antsiness about teen violence (and diminishing returns in the teen horror film genre) made the execs and Williamson shoot for a John Hughes feel. More than the presence of Molly Ringwald (awful, by the way) is supposed to make you think of Hughes during his Sixteen Candles heyday: Michael McKean looks vaguely like Jeffrey Jones in Ferris Bueller's Day Off; Barry Watson looks vaguely like Judd Nelson in Breakfast Club; and some of the establishing shots are just downright Hughes. But whereas Hughes was able to perfectly synch up his smirky self-involved scripts with the mindset of the 80's smirky self-involved teens, Williamson can't even synch up the parts of his script that have his teens clowning around (particularly Marisa Coughlan as Holmes' gal-pal JoLynn) and the parts involving his teens being miserable and put-upon and trapped. It ends up being Nine to Five with teens, is what it is. And it's not even half as good as Nine to Five, which gives you an idea of just how bad Teaching Mrs. Tingle really is.

Katie Holmes looks terrific, admittedly, but her character's lack of depth (basically just a variation on her Dawson's Creek Sigh. If only the movie had been 1/100 as cool as this image. "poor little Joey Potter" character) and a lack of anything to do in the movie but pout and fret (just like poor little Joey Potter) makes Holmes' performance seem like something you'd see on a dull episode of Dawson's. (It doesn't help that at least half of her scenes have the dialogue looped, giving her already distant performance an extra layer of distance). Watching her strip down to a bra was fun, but she was by far the weakest link in the acting chain, which is not a good for the star of the film. Barry Watson was surprisingly capable but lacks a certain something, as if he was doing a very good job of imitating a good actor. But he certainly deserves, say, Freddie Prinze Jr.'s career more than Freddie Prinze Jr. does. Marisa Coughlan, although frequently incredibly grating, seems to be the best actor of the three teens but that's because she gets the best scenes, has the most to do. Her imitation of Linda Blair in The Exorcist is credible but, coming as it does out of nowhere, embarrasses more than anything else (and it's obvious her scene was relooped so that less-offensive swear words could be put in her mouth and get the movie a PG-13 rating).

As for Mrs. Tingle, Helen Mirren does a remarkable job with what little she has; Tingle is supposed to wage psychological warfare with her captors which would be interesting if any of the characters had any depth, any psychology, to them. Instead we just get Mirren acting and reacting circles around the other actors, capable of doing more with her face and body even while tied to a bed than Katie Holmes can at any point in the movie. But Mirren's prodigousness actually works against the movie; making Tingle a brilliant actress makes her even less realistic a character.

It goes on and on; lousy soundtrack, lousy dialogue, lousy resolution, even a lousy understanding of basic physics. Teaching Mrs. Tingle is a veritable crapucopia. Pervs with even the basest of cinematic tastes are recommended to seek their icky jailbait thrills elsewhere.

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