THE LESSON (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Lesson, Bleecker Street

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 6, 2023

How much does a bad third act within an otherwise fine story ruin the experience? That's a question within The Lesson, and appropriately, it's the main question to ask about Alex MacKeith's screenplay for the movie.

Until its uncharacteristic and illogical third act, this is an otherwise fine story about a young, aspiring writer learning the hard way about that old lesson of never meeting one's heroes. In this case, the hero is a successful and acclaimed author, whose charismatically narcissistic public persona hides a level of a far more destructive brand of that trait. Watching this young man attempt to navigate his own motives with the growing realization that, on a personal level, his idol is wholly undeserving of any kind of worship is fascinating and unsettling.

The wannabe writer is Liam Sommers (Daryl McCormack), a man Oxford-educated in English literature who has spent a few years penning his first novel. In the meantime, he works as a tutor for those looking to be accepted into a prestigious institution for education. His newest client, assigned to him by the tutoring agency for which he works, is the teenaged son of the famous author J.M. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant).

This man is Liam's literary hero. He knows everything about Sinclair's work and as much about the writer's life as is possible, based on interviews with the man that he revisits all the way up to arriving at Sinclair's grand estate, where Liam will live in the guest house. Sinclair doesn't have much to say about his writing process, except that it's a necessary part of his existence, or his personal life, since he storms off the stage when one interviewer offers a question about how tragedy has or hasn't affected his writing. Sinclair is a bit of mystery, although the bulk of his personality and behavior is apparent upon meeting him for the time in person.

What's initially intriguing about MacKeith's screenplay is how much information he offers at the start. In fact, the script more or less provides us with the shape of an ending before the story proper even begins. A prologue shows Liam, who has just had his first novel published to much praise and many sales, being interviewed before a packed auditorium.

Things, obviously, will work out for our protagonist, and more to the point, MacKeith offers what appears to be a pretty clear answer as to how that will happen, too, as those Sinclair interviews play out on the way to the author's manor. His sole philosophy on the secret of writing is a simple one: "Good writers borrow, but great writers steal."

Offering that up at the start of director Alice Troughton's movie is a bold and confident move, and it's one that pays off for the first two parts, cleanly divided and announced by way of on-screen titles, of this tale. With at least some semblance of a resolution in mind, the story gives itself the leeway to deter to other, more important matters.

Mainly, that's witnessing how Sinclair operates, as a domineering husband to his wife Hélène (Julie Delpy) and father to the couple's son Bertie (Stephen McMillan), and how Liam uses this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn as much about his hero as possible, in order to find a way into the author's good graces. If he even has any of those, that is.

The tension here rests in those familial relationships, as Hélène's pleasant demeanor and Bertie's sarcastic attitude drop as soon as Sinclair enters the room from his office. Meanwhile, Liam tries to get closer to all three occupants of the mansion, while not giving away too much of the fact that he's far more interested in learning about and ingratiating himself to the famous author than doing his job as a tutor.

It's all about the little details, such as Liam trying to keep up with his hero's writing pace while watching him work from the view the tutor has of Sinclair's office, and the gradual revelations about Sinclair's capacity to "destroy"—his wife's word—the people closest to him. Grant subverts what can be his effortlessly charming persona in the role, making it plainly apparent what an effort it is for Sinclair to plaster a smile on his face. McCormack is quite good at playing a sympathetic but slightly enigmatic blank slate of a protagonist, whose motives are apparent but whose goals, based on that prologue, might not be as innocent as they seem.

There are secrets here, of course. Most of them are about the extent of Sinclair's destructive personality, as well as how much that behavior has damaged his family members, but there are also ones that come to drive the plot-heavy third act.

To call the sudden appearance of an elaborate and unclear scheme, revolving around multiple copies of a manuscript and Liam's convenient ability to recall large pieces of text on-demand, a disappointment would be an understatement. The mechanics of the third act of The Lesson beggar belief, particularly when it comes to just how many things have to line up for the plot to function and how unbelievably clean the resolution of a very messy climax is. None of it makes much, if any, sense, but more vitally, it feels like a betrayal of the character-focused drama the movie has been until that point.

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