Dead Poets Society Review

Weir is too good a director to make this look easy, and the film is beautiful in a specific way, John Seale shooting golden interiors and cold mornings so the school reads as refuge and prison at once. Robin Williams is extraordinary, and the discipline is what impresses now. He is funny in short bursts and then gets out of the way, which makes Keating a teacher rather than a routine. Robert Sean Leonard and Ethan Hawke are both excellent, and Neil's father is played with enough restraint that the tragedy is never cheapened into villainy.

What holds the film back is its actual argument about literature. Keating's teaching is a series of gestures, tearing out the introduction, standing on the desk, that flatter students without ever asking them to do difficult reading, and the movie presents this as liberation rather than as its own kind of shallowness. The final scene is manipulation of the highest quality and it works on nearly everyone. This is a moving film built on a thin idea, and both of those things are true at the same time.