Entertainment

WATCH: High marks for class act

The rousing school-choice movie “Won’t Back Down” is (already!) inspiring teachers’ unions to protest it with its standard dial-a-mob tactics, but the film makes a serious effort to present the other side’s points.

This did not have to be the case. “The Silence of the Lambs,” for instance, made little effort to be fair to serial killers, nor did “Independence Day” lay out the point of view of the aliens. But I’m being unfair. Serial killers and alien armies, unlike teachers’ unions, don’t destroy the dreams of millions of poor black kids.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a destitute single mom in Pittsburgh whose dyslexic second-grade daughter is failing to learn and is in danger of losing interest in school altogether, thanks to the generalized despair at a public school where only 2 percent of the students go on to college. (Viewers who doubt the film’s portrayal of some teachers as unmotivated need only do some minimal homework, such as dipping into Steven Brill’s book “Class Warfare.”)

Joining forces with a kind-hearted but dispirited teacher (Viola Davis), she seeks to exercise the “parent trigger” clause, currently being invoked in several cities, that would break the union stranglehold and enable the parents to set up their own more flexible public school. “We gotta be the change we want to see,” Gyllenhaal declares, in one of many calculated Obama-ish lines.

Together with a gifted teacher (Oscar Isaac) who is a union member and supporter, Gyllenhaal fights her way through the barbed wire of bureaucracy that is in place specifically to protect the union. Just getting a vote from the school board will require a huge effort, and the school board head (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) advises reading Kafka instead. “You’ll soon learn to embrace futility,” she says.

We hear all the standard rationalizations for why parents should have no choice in where their kids go to school. Poverty and crime are mentioned as factors in failing schools, and “Won’t Back Down” points out that most members of teachers unions are good and competent people. There are several speeches about how unions are “under attack” (if so, how come so many kids are still attending awful unionista schools?). One union official (Holly Hunter) who is the child of labor organizers is somewhat sympathetic to the lead characters. Nevertheless, she tries to buy off the Gyllenhaal figure by offering her kid a scholarship to private school, and warns that any teacher who joins the choice movement is turning herself into a pariah.

The movie makes some eccentric choices about visualizing some of the plot points (for instance, a set of bobblehead dolls are used for head-counting purposes as the leads try to get a majority of fellow teachers to vote for the new school). It can hit the drama pedal a little too eagerly (as when a black man named King casts an important vote right under a mural of Martin Luther King Jr.) Its production designer seems to think every home in the city is plastered with Steelers and Penguins memorabilia. And Gyllenhaal, very obviously a child of privilege, is not an ideal choice to play a daughter of the working class. She both overdoes the trashy look (I don’t see many receptionists who shampoo with 10W-40, as she appears to) and yet maintains her prep-school diction. In a world containing Marisa Tomei, why look anywhere else?

Still, I haven’t seen a timelier or more important film this year, and the film’s passion for school choice could hardly be more warranted. Along with documentaries such as “The Lottery” and “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” the film comes with a background sound of the ice of inertia cracking.

A critical discussion about education reform is finally happening among liberals (conservatives have long known better, of course) such as the union-loving teacher in the film who plasters his classroom with images of Jimmy Carter (!) and teaches his kids to rap JFK’s inaugural address. If we are really interested in acting, as the politicians keep saying, “for the children,” that means demanding accountability from the unions that purport to care about their pupils.