Tribeca 2015: TENURED Review

Adapted from his short film Teacher of the Year from 2012, Chris Modoono’s Tenured is an uproariously funny story about a tenured 5th-grade teacher on the verge of a complete emotional breakdown after his wife leaves him and his cushy do-nothing job becomes threatened. Through a smart and consistently funny script, Modoono crafts a film that manages to be hilarious and, dare I say, touching without losing its sense of humor.

The film stars Gil Zabarsky as Ethan Collins, an apathetic history teacher whose life is in shambles after his firefighter wife, Lauren (Emily Wilson), leaves him. As his depression begins to affect his work, his desire to enrich and mold the young minds of tomorrow vanishes, causing him to take a more lackadaisical approach to his teaching duties.

Tenured plays out like a much funnier and more earnest version of Bad Teacher, with Ethan often showing up for work hung over and not being at all concerned with filtering his children from adult language and situations. It’s this formula of a bitterly depressed man forced into a job where he must tend to rambunctious children that provides so much comedic fodder – something writer-director Modoono handles so deftly. Gil Zabarsky’s deadpan delivery additionally adds to the humor, once again proving there’s little that is more funny than a broken man struggling to simply get through the day.

As Ethan, who once had dreams of becoming a successful writer, continues his downward spiral, the school’s assistant principal, played by Kate Flannery, is plotting a way to get him fired, despite him having tenure. Her first tactic is to make him the director of the school play, something she knows he’ll fail in spectacular fashion. Some of these sequences came off as a bit silly but hardly detracted from their overall enjoyment.

Thematically, we’ve seen movies like this before, with the story being, by and large, fairly predictable. Where most films of this ilk falter however, is as the story reaches its conclusion, the comedy begins to fade away, and the more dramatic elements take over. In Tenured, the stream of comedy never really dissipates; it becomes more muted in spots, but the laughs are consistent.

Tenured is one of the most entertaining, and certainly one of the funniest, comedies I’ve seen this year. While the plot goes in the exact direction and hits all the beats that one might expect, the clever and never-not-funny dialogue makes up for that in spades. This is definitely one to check out.