Mark Reviews Movies: CRITICAL THINKING

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 3, 2020

The basic premise of the story of Critical Thinking will probably sound familiar: A passionate teacher or coach, with some unorthodox methods and ways thinking, teaches his overlooked and mostly dismissed students or players a lot about themselves, life, and the ways of the world by way of some field of study or sport. Chess serves as both the study and the sport here, just as Mario Martinez (John Leguizamo) serves as both the teacher and the coach. His students/players attend a public high school in a more impoverished part of Miami. While the group may be racially and ethnically diverse, each of them—we see directly or can assume based on the circumstances—have some problems resulting from the socioeconomic conditions in which they live.

One of the subtle strengths of Dito Montiel's screenplay is that more or less begins in medias res. A different version of this story might see Mario as a new arrival at the school. As a young and somewhat naïve new teacher, he might slowly have to earn his student's trust, and as a coach, he might give these kids a reason to think that chess somehow applies to their lives. He would encounter problems with the system—in terms of enthusiasm and funding—and find some clever, previously unknown way to get the money for his students/players to rise through the ranks of chess tournaments. Everyone would learn something valuable, and everything would work out for the best.

For the most part, that's not how Montiel presents this story. Here, Mario has been teaching for some time. The students in his elective class on critical thinking, focusing on chess, trust him enough that they keep showing up. The players already understand and are fairly proficient at chess. As for that system, Mario has been encountering it probably as long as he has been teaching. He likely has been fighting—and probably losing—that battle for interest and funding for about the same amount of time.

There's a mild but perceptive sense of weariness to these characters when we first meet them—a quality that Montiel and Leguizamo, as an actor and a director, convincingly capture. We do see it most in Mario, who hasn't given up on the few students who mostly ignore his class but has accepted that chess isn't for everyone. He has his group of players who care about and have learned the game, and Mario has no grand promises for them. There may be tournaments around the state and the country in which they could participate, but things being as they are, they and he will have to settle for the ones arranged at the school.

Obviously, all of this changes, because Mario believes in these students and has been putting money aside for a rainy day, but there's something refreshing about this particular approach to this kind of story, in the way it communicates things being the way they are. In the bigger picture, it's never clearer than in a series of scenes that focus on a student who is given detention. His "punishment" is sitting in on Mario's class. The teacher offers the kid a chance to learn chess, which the student refuses, but on the way out, he grabs a chessboard off a table.

Immediately, there's a certain expectation established here. The kid, who seemed uninterested in chess, might have some previously untapped skill in the game, and his curiosity, combined with Mario's guidance, might bring that potential to the surface.

Instead, though, the kid gets into an argument on the street while walking home. It escalates, and a local drug dealer gets involved. In an instant, the student, whose story seems to be just beginning, is dead—executed where he stood.

This, along with other fears and troubles, is the world in which these students/players live. The film isn't simply concerned with the lessons of a teacher (As prominent as Mario is at the start, he wisely fades into the background as the story progresses), the fight to get these players into tournaments with increasing stakes, or the way in which those tournaments go (They're shot as quick montages, really, until the final, climactic match). It actually takes its time to let us see these students' lives—the pain and the struggle and the fading hope that things don't always have to be the way they are.

Of top priority in this regard are Sedrick (Corwin C. Tuggles), whose father (played by Michael Kenneth Williams) has become controlling and angry in the years since the death of his wife and the son's mother, and Ito (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.), who's trying to juggle school and a job at an auto garage. Sedrick and Mario have a heart-to-heart about grieving after one tournament, but the teacher/coach, who knows and admits his platitudes often sound cheesy, doesn't have the answers for his student—not for the pain of loss or the ways to communicate with a grieving father. Ito eventually becomes caught up in the world of drugs that resulted in the other student's murder, and if Mario can't find the answers for Sedrick's problems, he's definitely not going to have any for Ito. For all these young men, the path is for them, hopefully, to discover.

The film (which we only learn is based on a true story in its final, uplifting moments) finds its inspiration, not in winning and having a game or a teacher provide the answers, but in the sharing and understanding of real camaraderie. The story of Critical Thinking may be familiar and seem clichéd, but there's a specificity to its storytelling that's anything but those qualities.

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