★★½ (2½ out of 4)
Here’s the thing about Saoirse Ronan. She makes every movie better just by being in it. Even a dud like “Mary, Queen of Scots.” But on that one she met “Slow Horses” actor Jack Lowden, her future husband and father of her child. At 32, with four Oscar nominations (“Atonement,” “Brooklyn,” “Lady Bird,” “Little Women”), Ronan—a citizen of Ireland and the U.S.—can have her pick of projects. That she chose “Bad Apples” is already a solid reason to see it.
You won’t be disappointed. Not in Ronan, anyway. She plays Maria Spencer, a primary school teacher in Somerset, England, finding her class of ten-year-olds disrupted by a bullying brat named Danny (a smashing newcomer Eddie Waller), who she cannot control. No one can. But it’s Maria who gets blamed by the school’s harried principal, Sylvia (Rakie Ayola). If she can’t tame Danny, she’s out. Even the problem child’s single father, Josh (Robert Emms), thinks there’s no hope for the mini tyrant, who casually pushes a fellow student down a flight of stairs. Since Maria has been dumped by her boyfriend Sam (Jacob Anderson), job security is all she has.
Saoirse Ronan superbly rises to the occasion, but this film too often settles for being an imitation of life instead of the real unruly, undisciplined thing.
Ronan makes you feel for Maria. Until the snapping point, which comes with the arrival of school inspection. Things must be perfect, not that Danny will allow it. When the cursing little loudmouth threatens Maria (“I’ll say you touched me”), she does the unthinkable: takes him home and holds him hostage in her basement. She mutes his screams with farm machinery. Oh, she feeds him, using a harness when necessary, even home schools him, but this is kidnapping, a crime not to be laughed off. Even satire has its limits.
Or does it? We do laugh, at first. With Danny stifled, everything thing else blossoms. Maria’s students suddenly feel free to learn. Maria comes out of her shell and thrives as she is praised for class improvement. Even Danny learns things. And his relationship with Maria takes on a bantering kind of affection. In fact, no one really misses him. Has there been a fragile, needy child locked inside the pre-teen thug all along? I fear you know the answer.
And yet Ronan makes most of it work. As an actress, she seems incapable of making a false move. I can’t say the same for the script. In its clumsy efforts to undercover rotten apples everywhere, (Would you believe the film is set near an apple orchard complete with handy visuals of the fruit spoiling?), the film states the obvious without shame.
The actors do their best to save it. When one of Maria’s students, Paulina (a brilliantly bad-seed-ish Nia Brown), finds out that her teacher is a kidnapper, she doesn’t call the authorities. She blackmails Maria into making her teacher’s pet. Is this school and its environs the whole of society in miniature—a den of hypocrisy where adults teach children the value of expediency in a troubled world? “Bad Apples” would have it so. I much prefer the film when it isn’t thesis mongering, when it simply lets action define character.
And that it does when the extraordinary Ronan and young Waller duet the shifting power relationships between student and teacher, adult and child. Don’t get me wrong. There are appalling laughs along the way, even some that draw blood. But too often “Bad Apples” settles for being an imitation of life instead of the real unruly, undisciplined thing.