There’s a great scene in Kenneth Lonergan’s briefly acclaimed and quickly forgotten indie drama You Can Count On Me in which a thirtysomething Mark Ruffalo tells off his eight-year-old nephew Rudy for betraying the terms of their friendship. “If you’re such a baby that you gotta tell your mommy about us playing pool when I totally asked you not to,” he tells the boy, who’s clearly unaccustomed to being told it straight, “then you are going to the babysitter’s.”
As a child, there’s something simultaneously exhilarating and unnerving about being treated as an adult, as the entire student body of the Teddy McArdle Free School in New Jersey finds out in Approaching The Elephant, Amanda Rose Wilder’s striking documentary portrait of democracy writ small. Free school doctrine demands total parity between students and educators, so Teddy McArdle Free School (captured here in its inaugural year) allows its kids to write their own rules from the ground up – even those that might elsewhere seem self-evident. The result is a radical spin on institutional hierarchy: after head teacher Alex prevents a group of kids from jumping off a bookcase onto a mattress, it’s him that must be disciplined, charged with harassment by a committee of under-10s.
The children soon build a community as fraught, bureaucratic and intermittently triumphant as any democratic society, albeit one with an emotional baseline of massive over-tiredness. Before long, many of the kids are calling for emergency meetings and correcting each other’s judicial protocol with zeal, but when all else fails they still resort to grumpy obstinacy. Case in point: immediately prior to the aforementioned harassment trial, a striking tableau of pre-teen chaos assembles at the scene of the crime, with Alex forced to physically restrain a frustrated child as one of his peers walks calmly to the blackboard and – the screams of rogue classmates ringing in his ears – scrawls “FUCKKKK!” across its surface.
Also out this week
Predestination Ethan Hawke is a time-travelling terrorist hunter.
The Grandmaster Wong Kar-Wai is back for the first time since that awful Norah Jones movie.
Electricity Agyness Deyn is an actor now.
