Mark Reviews Movies: MY OLD SCHOOL

My Old School, Magnolia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 21, 2022

Where does one even begin with the story of My Old School? Director Jono McLeod's documentary features so many twists, turns, and surprises that the fear is one too many details, one intentional or accidental revelation, or one hint about the truth of this real-life, stranger-than-fiction tale might ruin the experience of McLeod's well-crafted game.

Here, we meet a seemingly ordinary man, who went to secondary school in a well-to-do Scottish town in the mid-1990s. He speaks of overcoming adversity and doing what people believed would be impossible, and it all seems like a fairly straightforward setup to some unique and maybe inspiring real-world story. McLeod, though, immediately lets us also know that something is decidedly off about the man.

For one thing, the film's subject refuses to be recorded by the filmmakers, which makes us think, perhaps, of some sort of witness protection program or some kind of medical difficulty. The director does, after all, intercut scenes of an empty but ordinary classroom with images suggesting surgery. Voices speak of the younger version of this man and how his face had the appearance of a waxy sort of mask, and maybe that's a clue about this nearly 30-year-old tale that we're about to hear.

Whatever that story may be, it has to be improbably odd or miraculously uplifting, because McLeod's introductory titles also point out that the story of his subject's life previously had never been made into a movie. It must have some level of fame or infamy, but if that's the case, why is this man so reluctant to appear in front of a camera?

Why is Alan Cumming portraying a man the director interviewed, lip-syncing the words spoken by the subject (with real technical and performance skill, by the way)? This is, by the way, a bit of full circle for Cumming, who was slated to play the subject of this documentary in a narrative film in the late 1990s until the project fell apart. That brings us right back to the start: What's the fascination with this man and his life?

The questions are numerous, and they don't stop, even after we think we have heard all of the shocking and seemingly unbelievable elements of the tale of someone called Brandon Lee. For all intents and purposes, he was a regular teenager and student at Bearsden Academy in the sleepy, middle-class town with the same name as the school circa 1995. Yes, it's strange that he shares a name with the actor whose on-set death came as such a shock around the same time, and yes, it's weirder, perhaps, that the adult man claims he was unaware of the actor around that time.

Even his classmates, some of whom are interviewed here, thought that was very odd, and they think it's especially peculiar that their old friend or acquaintance still insists he had no idea about the famous person who shared that name. A lot has changed about their perception of this guy, to understate matters, and such an unlikely but apparently accurate detail about the truth makes them think about him in yet an additionally different way.

Perception is funny like that—in how the little things can create such a significant shift in one's outlook. Memory is strange, too, in that maybe all of these people are mistaken in their awareness of the actor at the time they met the student with the same name.

For all of the clever diversions and distractions and outright deflection that McLeod employs here, perception and memory are really at the heart of this film, which tells the story as everyone saw it at the time of their youths, only to pull the rug out from under the audience with a revelation that's not exactly a shock. The real surprises come when McCleod forces everyone to reckon with, in retrospect, a truth that seemed so obvious, a series of lies that were so transparent, and a bunch of rumors, local myths, and memories that turn out to be fake, real, or misremembered to the point that the interviewees aren't certain if they can trust themselves by the end.

The story, presented in animated segments that mirror a bit of the art style of the period (with the likes of Cumming, Clare Grogan, and Lulu providing the vocal work), doesn't seem like much at the start, save for the puzzle McCleod establishes right away. A young Lee arrives at a new school, where students and faculty find him to be quite different from the usual teenager, and gradually makes some friends. The subject himself describes his tragic back story until that point in his life, and things more or less line up in everyone's mind.

Then, the floor drops from beneath everything, and McCleod doesn't simply revel in the uncovered and unexpected revelations—as bizarre as a claim of mind control, which some start to believe might be true, and a "resurrection," as amusing as a live singing performance that's nowhere near as good as people recall, as disturbing as a stage kiss that's much more than the "avuncular" one the subject claims he offered. The filmmaker digs into the notion that people only remember what and how they want to, while the truth of any person or story is only as reliable as a wholly unreliable narrator and a collection of narratives that have become the stuff of local legend.

My Old School leaves us with as many questions—about the man and his motives, who knew what and why they might cover up the truth, and what's next for this mystery man—as answers. The more important questions, though, have to do with nature of memory and how it functions to protect us from truths as harsh as the ones our subject refuses to acknowledge and as unsettling as the ones with which his classmates are still reckoning.

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