The Lesson (2023)
A young academic is tripped up by a vainglorious writer and his troubled family
A trusting Liam (Daryl McCormack) is thrust into deeper waters than he can understand
The Lesson (2023)
In theaters
You’ll want to watch closely as you take in this arty, gorgeously shot psychological thriller. In the opening sequence, labeled a “Prologue”, we see a handsome young Black man, Liam Sommers (Daryl McCormack, smooth and easygoing in 2022’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande), being interviewed on TV about his new novel.
With a twinkly smile he informs the audience that his book is about what happened to him. So, everything that follows in the movie is a flashback. Remember that.
At the beginning of the tale, we see Liam ride his bike up to a lakeside. He climbs off, calmly strips down to swim trunks and confidently dives into the water.
This guy can swim. Remember that.
Liam is finishing his doctoral thesis in English literature at Oxford, writing admiringly about the celebrated novelist J.M. Sinclair.
What a stroke of good luck, then, that Liam’s been hired to tutor Sinclair’s teenaged son Bertie, who needs to ace a tough entrance exam to get into Oxford.
Liam bicycles through leafy English countryside onto the wealthy author’s enormous, gated estate. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant) shares this expansive property, including a multi-winged mansion and a private lake, with his frosty, unsmiling wife Hélène (Julie Delpy) and their morose, unhappy son Bertie (Stephen McMillan).
What threw me off in the movie’s first third was screenwriter Alex MacKeith’s deliberately arch dialogue and the tight, forlorn performing it required from the actors. Even the cool, gray-haired majordomo Ellis (Crispin Letts) musters little more than a courteous perfunctory smile.
These five make up the entire cast, and the director, Alice Troughton, keeps everyone on a tight performing leash. Emotional upheaval, when it erupts, is timed like a metronome.
You always see it coming, and that’s precisely the point. Because what’s behind the anger, despair and nastiness is buried very deep. That’s what you’ll need to be on the lookout for.
We learn that this cold domicile’s cheerlessness has a dark root. J.M. and Hélène’s slightly older son Felix drowned in the property’s vast private lake when he and his brother were barely into their teens. He took his own life. Bertie, wracked with guilt, wonders if he could have stopped him.
J.M., Liam, Hélène and Bertie are all fighting to come out on top in a rancorous household
This tragedy haunts the family and begins to overshadow Liam’s tutoring assignment. Bertie proves to be a snarling, sarcastic student who mocks Liam’s superior knowledge. Rather than answer his tutor’s queries he insists on writing his own undisciplined essays, which he barely wants Liam to review.
Hélène icily lays down the strict terms of Liam’s employment, demanding his signature on a rigorous non-disclosure agreement about anything he sees or hears.
J.M., then, is fully protected, and he chooses to go full bore as a mirthlessly cackling martinet. At the chilly evening meals, he picks all the dinner music, dominates the conversation, and abruptly leaves the table the moment he becomes bored.
What makes the movie fun to watch is slowly realizing that this nest of vipers offers its inhabitants so few options. They’d do better to make nice, but refuse.
Most captivating here is McCormack’s Liam, whose sexy charm and poise hold the picture together.
Liam, meanwhile, patiently indulges Bertie’s moods, which leaves him with time on his hands. J.M. pounces. For one thing, Liam has picked up some IT skills, and he can help the technically hapless older man resolve file-saving problems.
More important, since Liam fancies himself a writer, J.M. recruits the tutor to review passages in the novel he’s completing. It’s a comeback book after eight years without publishing, and J.M. believes it could make or break his legacy.
To do Liam a return favor, the distinguished author offers to read the manuscript of Liam’s first novel. Both men are set up for a writer-to-writer showdown, and when it comes, laced with fury, vanity and pride, neither man will ever feel the same about the other.
I can recall only three mano-a-mano movies featuring clashing writers: Sleuth (1972) starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine; Deathtrap (1982) with Caine as the older writer and Christopher Reeve as his young nemesis; and a bizarre 1987 remake of Sleuth with Caine again as an older writer and Jude Law as a scheming upstart.
Troughton here walks a middle ground. In her directorial debut she’s both tingly and coy with the story’s twists, which include physical and emotional shockers, but she’s never cheaply sensational.
Hélène keeps a superior distance from these fraught male egos, gauging in her own mind who’s going to survive the internecine battles.
Hélène and Liam find an intimate moment to share their fears of an oncoming calamity
What makes the movie fun to watch is slowly realizing that this nest of vipers offers its inhabitants so few options. They’d do better to make nice, but refuse.
J.M. is a bragging egomaniac. How talented is he? We’re deliberately left unsure. Hélène lets her husband rule and retreats into her work as an art curator. Liam is smart and keenly observant, but between these two he’s inescapably a pawn.
Bertie’s misery obviously has a deeper source than academic anxiety, but Liam can’t wring the truth out of him.
Part of what kept me entertained was Anna Patarakina’s piercing, diamond sharp cinematography, immaculate yet eerie. Also, the calculated deceptions contrast with the elegant, baroque set design, and Isabel Waller-Bridge’s fluttery classical score lightly teases the story’s nastiness and deceit.
At one point Liam takes a leisurely swim in the property’s lake, stretching out in the water and feeling a calm we haven’t seen on his face before. J.M. suddenly appears and orders him out of the water. Since Felix’s untimely death, the family has denied itself the pleasure of swimming in the fateful lake, and Liam must do the same.
Liam agrees, but we see in his eyes that he means to go into that lake again, and not let its clammy hold on this despondent family pull him down in its undertow.
The hyped up, stylized performances serve the piece. Grant at first seems a trifle overemphatic as the callous J.M.
But J.M.’s florid teeth-baring is exactly what the script needs. He could be a genuinely talented, bestselling writer who, desperate to revive his career, has turned into a hack. Liam would spot his idol’s fall for sure. And we know J.M. would have trouble hearing a critique from a young admirer.
Delpy is provocatively hard to read as the forbidding Hélène, enduring her husband’s bombast apparently for Bertie’s sake, but working some other agenda behind her steady stare.
McMillan makes Bertie’s anguish truly sympathetic. After J.M. denigrates him as unequal to the gifted Felix, McMillan believably shows how a belittled son’s pain and anger can mutate into a fighting stance.
Most captivating here is McCormack’s Liam, whose sexy charm and poise hold the picture together. Confronted with this palace of neurotics, Liam seems to maintain a quiet, unruffled dignity.
But when his own cunning instincts get the better of him, he’s drawn into deceptions far more serpentine than he could have envisioned.
Yet McCormack (craftier and even more assured here than in Leo Grande) seizes on Liam’s dexterity as a long-distance swimmer. When surrounded by piranhas the naive young academic surely feels their sharp teeth.
But his bookishness has taught him about plots: the best ones provide a challenger with ploys his enemies wouldn’t have dared to imagine.