Very similar to my complaint about
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), the first half of
Educating Rita wades through a bunch of outdated jokes and, like a child whose taken too many theater classes, there's an awkward effort to come across as "cute." However also like
Alice, the film finds the real meat of what it's trying to be in the second half. Unfortunately, there is an over-the-top score throughout the whole. So if you can't tune out shmarmy music, I'm afraid
Rita may be too much for you. But if you can, this flick goes into some great territory.
Rita (Julie Walters) is a hair stylist who's struck out to explore the world of literature. She takes a correspondence course that requires her to meet with a professor, Dr. Bryant (Michael Caine), who is a frustrated poet and an alcoholic. Their relationship is the real heart of this pygmalion story with a poignant twist. Rita wants to become refined and intellectual, Bryant wants to preserve her low-brow intensity and passion because it's what he fells he's lost in himself.
In a theme that seems to show itself to me everywhere since watching
F for Fake,
Educating Rita takes a hard stab at the notion of an expert (in this case becoming an expert) and how, like a vampire, an expert can use their expertise to suck the life from a piece of art for the sake of their own existence. In the most poignant moment for me, Bryant, at the bottom of his despair, says he'd like to reinvent himself as Mary Shelley: an eighteen year old girl who, without a single nod toward literary critics, wrote one of the most thoughtful and moving stories ever,
Frankenstein.
Beneath the surface, this film is a struggle between two people who really want the other person to be somebody other than who they are. The film ends without either of them really fixing each other, which I'm grateful for. They entered each other's lives for a season, and they came out of that season for the better because they knew each other.What more can you ask from a relationship?