MISS STEVENS Review

6.5

Film Pulse Score

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RELEASE DATE: September 20, 2016 (Limited and VOD)
DIRECTOR: Julia Hart
MPAA RATING: NR
RUNTIME: 86 minutes

“Do you like America?”

“What?”

“It’s the name of the band.”

The introverted Billy (Timothée Chalamet) is explaining this peculiar band name to the prim and proper Margot (Lili Reinhart) as the song “Sister Golden Hair” plays on the car radio. They’re both high school students and, along with the flamboyantly gay Sam (Anthony Quintal), are headed to a weekend drama competition. Their school no longer formally funds such pursuits, so it’s been turned into an extracurricular field trip, and the kids are chaperoned and driven both ways by Rachel Stevens (Lily Rabe), a young English teacher.

There’s something frankly unusual about spending time with a teacher outside of school, especially in a small group. The power dynamic remains in its most basic form, yet the details dramatically change when the classroom setting is altered and the teacher no longer physically towers over seated students. Julia Hart’s directorial debut, appropriately entitled Miss Stevens, seeks to explore this idea further.

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Miss Stevens begins to truly connect with these three kids over the weekend, especially Billy. She is told by the school’s principal that the boy is troubled, but is offered little more explanation. In the process of this emotional growth, she begins to address her own traumas and troubles, yet she begins to feel overwhelmed in this capacity as a mentor and wonders if there may be some truth to the advice of another teacher (Rob Huebel), who firmly relays his strategy of educating his own students but firmly holds true to staying “on the outside” for anything in their lives that takes place outside the classroom.

The highlight of Miss Stevens is Lily Rabe’s performance in the title role. She energetically maneuvers the character, depicting a kind of façade. Behind Miss Stevens’ occupational requirement to assert herself as an authority figure, she – in reality – is barely holding herself together. She misses her mother, who has been dead for a year, and has had immense trouble in engaging with the void that has been formed by her absence. Rabe captures these complicated feelings throughout a whirlwind of scenes.

One sticks out in particular. Billy has lost the key to his hotel room and needs to pass the time before Sam returns to the building and lets him in. Miss Stevens lets him into her room, and eventually they go out onto the balcony, where she explains who her mom was – her passions, dreams and legacy. In this moment, for the briefest of seconds, Billy is not a student and she is not his teacher. They are people. And when she begins to well up at the magnitude of her loss, the tears come out. She begins to sob. She hugs him; she holds on. It’s a platonic embrace. It’s one of support. She’s lost in her grief. But soon reality returns, and so do the rules of engagement.

It’s times like these when Miss Stevens is a wonderful movie – clear, heartfelt and pure – when it explores the fluctuating, bending rules of how teachers and pupils interact, and Miss Stevens’ fight to maintain those barriers. She knows that nobody could handle the stress of becoming a personal advisor to the lives of dozens of kids, but she finds it so hard to stay away.

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But the briefness of the film, at less than an hour and a half, precludes Hart and co-writer Jordan Horowitz from developing more events like these, in which the characters interact in such stunningly fundamental ways. We, for example, never learn very much about Billy. Timothée Chalamet is a gifted actor, and he brings insight to what he is given, but there are only a handful of occasions in which his character’s life and his own struggles are viewed in depth. The other two students, Sam and Margot, are hardly given much at all.

It’s this kind of imbalance that makes Miss Stevens feel complexly developed in some areas and anemically underwritten in others. It is still a film worth seeing, on the strength of Rabe’s performance at the very least, but one can’t help but wishing for another 15 or 20 minutes, which may have fleshed out the screenplay and brought things around in a much more organic way.

The movie takes place over one weekend. A fair degree of the story plays out on Friday – a lot more on Saturday but only a little bit on Sunday. There is a buildup to a solid resolution, but one never comes. It’s a weakness of the plot’s execution that we never get a definitive ending, but it’s a testament to the strength of the film’s general plotting and the sturdiness of the acting that one is so desired to begin with.

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