The Most Absorbing Netflix Movie You’ve Never Seen
I’m always thinking about 'The Kindergarten Teacher.'
“I remember being 12 and seeing Matilda the Musical and sobbing my eyes out because I was like, ‘Damn, I’m a failure. I don’t even have a career,’” 22-year-old Billie Eilish said recently, a few hours after becoming the youngest person to ever win two Oscars. Ten years earlier, she said, she “was bawling from the back in the nosebleeds, and I was like, ‘I’m never going to amount to anything because I’m not in Matilda.’”
Didn’t everyone want to be a prodigy growing up? Or was it just girls who read The Princess Diaries and journaled for an imagined audience, or watched Disney Channel and wanted the privilege of waving a wand and saying “Hi I’m Hunter, and you’re watching Disney Channel.” Maybe it’s a divorced parent thing. There was a romantic mystery to being a prodigy, being the type of child adults don’t only fawn over but respect. I wanted to be a prodigy singer (I can’t sing), prodigy student (I was always too bad at math), prodigy athlete (lasted approximately one day in track, one weekend in basketball, two middle school seasons in volleyball), prodigy actress (did one production of Ragtime that really couldn’t have been worse). There’s a delirious, fucked up way we obsess over the gifted, the special. Would it be alright if I devoured you or replaced you? I can’t decide.
It’s too late for Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal) to be a prodigy. She’s not that talented anyway. But Lisa wants to be special badly, selfishly, almost cruelly. She insists she’s an artist in her own quiet, severe way. In The Kindergarten Teacher, released in 2018, she settles for being prodigy-adjacent. When one of her students starts mumbling nonsequiturs, Lisa decides that she’s bearing witness to his genius.
“Anna is beautiful,” the boy, 5-year-old Jimmy, says absentmindedly. “Beautiful enough for me. The sun hits her yellow house. It’s almost like a sign from God.” It’s because Lisa is so desperate to find profundity in her own talent that her ears perk up when she hears someone else’s. Jimmy’s babysitter shrugs it off, but Lisa insists the words are a poem and transcribes it immediately. In her adult poetry class, she shares his words as her own. The teacher (Gael García Bernal), who dismissed her as another wannabe creative starts, to pay attention. Her classmates seethe.
And so begins her undoing:
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