Impediments
Essay Preview: Impediments
Report this essay
It isnt easy to give a good performance while hollering through a bullhorn, but it can be done. And Morgan Freeman manages it in Lean on Me, in which he plays Joe Clark, the controversial high-school principal from Paterson, N.J. Mr. Freeman marches through the film at full blast, berating the students of Eastside High School in the tough, bombastic style for which Mr. Clark became well known. The film never wonders what it is in Mr. Clarks makeup that makes him rely almost exclusively on such bullying tactics, preferring instead to admire him as a galvanizing force.
Compared with Jaime Escalante, the mathematics teacher who goads his students into passing calculus in Stand and Deliver, this films Joe Clark takes a far less delicate approach. His first act at Eastside, after shouting down an auditorium full of rowdies at a school assembly, is summarily to expel 300 miscreants on the grounds that they probably wont graduate anyway. Mr. Clark, clearly not a man afraid of making enemies, doesnt stop at this. He browbeats his staff, he wields a baseball bat, he padlocks school doors in violation of fire laws (to keep out drug dealers) and he insists that all Eastside students be ready to sing the school alma mater on demand.
Audiences are apt to root for the films Mr. Clark even when they arent entirely enthusiastic about what hes doing. Much of this is attributable to Mr. Freemans fiery and compelling performance, but a lot of it also comes from the director John G. Avildsen (Rocky), who has stacked the deck in every way he can. Though the screenplay abounds in one-dimensional characters – not the least of them Mr. Clark himself -and doesnt give much detail to the story of Eastsides transformation, the set design is loud and clear. The garbage and graffiti of the films early scenes give way to tidy classrooms and waxed floors as the school is meant to improve.
None of Lean on Me, which opens today at the Sutton and other theaters, is appreciably more subtle than this. In fact, the films grandstanding reaches such a fever pitch that Joe Clark, wearing heroic white, winds up at the head of a mob of a thousand students chanting his praises, while his chief enemy cowers at stage right. Fortunately, Mr. Freeman himself is not the grandstanding type, and in this scene he avoids gloating and attempts nothing more than a small, ingenuous smile of satisfaction. He humanizes Joe Clark even when the film works overtime to make him larger than life.
Also in the cast are Robert Guillaume, as the school superintendant who gives Mr. Clark his chance to resurrect Eastside; Beverly Todd as Mr. Clarks loyal but underappreciated assistant principal; Jermaine Hopkins as a kid with a drug problem who is grudgingly given a second chance by Mr. Clark, and Karen Malina White and Regina Taylor as a student and her mother who are put back on the right track thanks to Mr. Clarks