PG | 1h 46 min | Drama | 1974
Director Martin Ritt’s intimate film draws from “The Water is Wide,” Georgia-born Pat Conroy’s memoir about his experiences as a school teacher on the tiny island of Yamacraw, South Carolina.
Descendants of poor black slaves and their families inhabit Yamacraw. The island school is a shack, packed with illiterate black kids from ages 10 to 13 who have been cut off from the world since infancy. They struggle to pronounce English words and names, and end up calling Conroy “Conrack.”
Conrack (Jon Voight) cares. You see it from the opening shot. Just out of bed in the early morning, eyes barely open, he stumbles through his room, feeding his fish in a tank, his bird in a cage, his plant near a window.
But his exuberance isn’t prepared for sneering hostility from the black school principal, Mrs. Scott (Madge Sinclair). Her approach to teaching is through an iron hand, and she orders a bewildered Conrack to follow suit, an order that he gleefully defies. It doesn’t help that he’s a foreigner several times over: tall, white, young, blond, generous, and smiling.
On his first day, Conrack watches kids file in, unkempt, sullen, and famished perhaps from labor before and after school, running homes and caring for younger kids alongside parents or other adults. No less sullen, Mrs. Scott makes a point of introducing him merely as a replacement teacher, while reminding the kids that they’re dimwitted and lazy and won’t ever get ahead without what she sees as the drudgery of learning.
As Conrack takes charge of class, he’s shocked. The kids are smart, eager, and willing to work at their learning. What’s missing is teaching. Not quality teaching, but any teaching at all: reading, math, writing, speaking. Unfazed, he plunges in to teach far more than their impoverished curriculum will allow.
The kids brighten at his sincerity and his intent, never mind his methods, which are as unorthodox and comic as they are varied. Perched on a tree branch with apples in hand, he preaches Newton, Kepler, and the laws of gravity. Ball in hand, he coaches them to separate playing around from sport. When he discovers that few, if any, on the island know how to swim, he teaches the kids to master and enjoy swimming.
He shows them a movie about adventure on the high seas, and introduces them to the joys of fine music.
The Power of One
Even in sunset shots Voight burns bright like a flame, radiating tenacity and tenderness.Ritt picks the rarest of rare true stories and brings it to life. He excels in using the character of 13-year-old Mary (Tina Andrews) to personalize the children. Scenes wherein she shares her ambitions and fears with Conrack are the most authentic. The other children remain one-dimensional, a hazy collective rather than distinct individuals with their own interiority. Ritt could have fleshed out a few more child-characters as sensitively as he did Mary’s.
Sure, you can watch Ritt’s film through the obvious prism of color and class. You’ll see cynical adults, black and white, too steeped in harsh reality to naively dream that children can shape their own futures, free of society’s shackles, if only they put their minds to it. You’ll also see Conrack as one of those adults swimming against this tide with the hopeful, heroic, even arrogant belief that things can—and will—change.
Conrack’s speech on the mainland at the end is a cinematic extension of his relatively obscure rebellion on the island. Like Martin Luther King Jr., he dares to imagine that dreams will one day shape reality.
To cynics, Conrack’s offbeat and often outdoor pedagogy is an affront to children, whose hope will be shaken out of them soon enough. Why bother filling their heads with exciting images and sounds of an equitable world they’ll never see, never enter, never experience?
Yet Jon Voight is so personable that he persuades you to watch the film through Conrack’s prism of possibilities. Conrack feels what any teacher feels standing before a classroom of students: near limitless freedom to open minds, elevate thoughts, and stir emotions. And near infinite power to do the opposite. A gift by any stretch.
Conrack responds to that gift with gratitude, honesty, humility, and responsibility. He isn’t about changing the country with some grand social-reform movement. He’s about changing it one child at a time. He isn’t telling his visibly underprivileged students that the world’s a cold, hard place that’ll knock you down any chance it gets. He’s saying to nurture in yourself the best heart, mind, and spirit that you can, and you’ll at least give yourself a fighting chance.
That’s more than most teachers manage. And it’ll do.
