Bad Education is an average movie with an above-average cast.
Premiering Saturday at 8 p.m. ET on HBO, Bad Education, therefore, offers a decent way to visit with some old TV and movie friends and spend another weekend night at home.
Hugh Jackman (top) stars as Frank Tassone, the district superintendent who helped rocket Roslyn High School into the top echelon of American high schools by the early years of the 21st century.
Allison Janney (top) plays Pam Gluckin, Tassone’s right arm. Gluckin modestly asserts that she’s the one who really makes this place run, and there’s some truth to that. While Tassone is an impeccable PR face for the school, Gluckin handles many of the nuts and bolts.
Between them, they’ve got it all. No, they’ve really got it all, including millions of dollars they have skimmed from the district to pay for expensive suits, Concorde flights to London, waterfront rentals, luxury cars, cool electronics, vacations, and other sorts of, oh, let’s call them perks.
None of this constitutes a spoiler. Bad Education takes its storyline from the well-publicized doings of the real-life Frank Tassone and Pam Gluckin, both of whom went to prison for their trouble.
What distinguishes the Roslyn scandal from others is that the perpetrators were brought down, in some measure, by a student.
Rachel Bhargava (Geraldine Viswanathan) writes for the school newspaper. She’s been assigned a story on the skywalk being built at Roslyn High, and she needs a comment from Gluckin or Tassone to fill out what she apologetically calls “just a puff piece.”
Tassone, who takes pride in making personal connections with the students at Roslyn High, tells Rachel that a story is only a puff piece if the writer sees it that way. A journalist, he says, can always find something of substance.
Her imagination tickled, and her curiosity inspired, Rachel asks to see the bids on the skywalk. Sure, says Pam, sending Rachel to a basement room crammed floor to ceiling with file boxes. Needle. Haystack.
Well, you can probably guess what Rachel finds. It’s not unlike what the auditors find, though in the auditors’ case, it’s embarrassing because it means they missed it the first time.
Bad Education resists the temptation to focus on the story of a plucky student journalist, though it gives Rachel full credit. One memorable scene has her resisting Tassone’s patronizing attempts to convince her she should stop what she’s doing because she might, you know, hurt her own future if she starts writing stuff like this.
Rachel comes off as smart and somewhat puzzled, but ultimately driven by what she increasingly knows to be the truth.
More of the movie, however, concentrates on grownups Tassone and Gluckin. It’s not the role of a lifetime for either Jackman or Janney, but both do a nice job conveying the slow, inexorable panic that builds as they realize they’re being busted.
Tassone, in particular, has built a whole life that he thinks is secret, but really isn’t. Once the money part gets out, so does all the rest.
Bad Education, while it details a depressing story, ends up turning into something close to a feel-good flick, because the bad guys, whom we understand a little but don’t really like, end up going down.
It’s not a bad thing these days to see the bad guys lose.