RADICAL - Mark Reviews Movies

Radical, Pantelion Films / Participant

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 2, 2023

Kids are smarter than most people probably think. A great teacher knows that, and Radical, a fine film based on a true story, is about such a teacher.

He's a man who hopes that his students, who have been written off by the educational system and most of society as hopeless children trapped in and doomed to a life of poverty, won't just learn what he has to teach them. He trusts that they'll want to learn even more than what's on some lesson plan or within some standardized test.

The teacher, highlighted in an article by Joshua Davis, is named Sergio Juárez Correa, who arrived in the Mexican border city of Matamoros with only a sliver of an idea about how to revolutionize how his new class of sixth-graders would receive an education. Whether or not his system of learning actually worked is probably a question that doesn't need answering. Davis probably wouldn't have written a piece about the teacher if his methods were a failure, and one imagines writer/director Christopher Zalla wouldn't have adapted that article into a film if that had been the case, either.

The joy of this film is in watching the process work. It does so, too, against what seems to be such insurmountable odds as the school's skeptical faculty and administration, education officials who only want good test scores and have a habit of lining their own pockets with funding that's intended for the schools in their charge, and a backdrop of poverty and violence that seems to pull these kids toward it like gravity.

One of these students, who either wants to be in a local gang or sees it as his only choice in life until this new teacher arrives, essentially makes that last description on his own, after learning about how that physical force works on Earth, within the solar system, and beyond. His teacher could have suggested the idea or directly explained it to him, but because this kid devises the conceit on his own, it means so much more.

Zalla understands the power of this notion, in terms of both what this teacher has accomplished and the film's own drama. It's compelling, not only because we get to know the teacher and a select number of his students on a personal level, but also on account of how the filmmaker focuses on the inherent curiosity, the desire to investigate theories and ideas, and the sparks of realization of these kids. It's a film about learning that actually conveys the process of doing so in simple, clear, and inspiring ways.

Here, Sergio is played by Eugenio Derbez, who is perhaps the most popular actors in Mexico at the moment—although his influence and career have expanded as of late into the United States. He is best known and has had the most commercial success as a comedic actor, and even though he has also expanded that range recently in dramatic supporting roles, his leading performance here is a bit revelatory. This man isn't a clown who just happens to be a teacher. He's a man who mainly uses humor as one of the many tools in his teaching process, but every fiber of his being is devoted to ensuring that this class of students won't end up like the others he has had or known of—lost to systematic failures and systemic societal issues.

On his first day at his new school, Sergio has overturned all of the tables and desks in the classroom, asking his class to imagine the pieces of furniture are lifeboats and that the floor is the ocean. It's meant to be a lesson about fractions, but in the ensuing days when he tries to explain how the kids left without boat are akin to the remainders of a math problem, the students are more curious about how flotation works. Instead of forcing them back to what he thought they'd learn from the exercise, Sergio encourages them to think about those questions and explore the possible answers.

Much of the story revolves around that kind of intellectual examination. They posit hypotheses about why some things float better than others. They figure out the concept of density and try to figure out who has more, either Sergio or the school's director Chucho (Daniel Haddad), who seems to be an obvious antagonist in this story but quickly comes around to his new teacher's methods when he sees them working and has a heart-to-heart with him about why they're in this vocation in the first place.

We meet and come to understand the lives of a few of the kids, too. There's Paloma (Jennifer Trejo), the class' whiz kid, who lives next to a garbage dump with her sickly father (played by Gilberto Barraza), hopes to watch rockets launch in Texas with a telescope she says she found among the trash, and dreams of becoming an astronaut. We also have Nico (Danilo Guardiola), the kid moving toward a life in a gang but who realizes there could be more, and Lupe (Mia Fernanda Solis), who is helping to raise her younger siblings and discovers that she enjoys thinking about the bigger questions of life and morality.

Obviously, these external circumstances and forces put Sergio's process and optimism to their own sort of test, and if Radical eventually moves toward a more melodramatic approach, the film has, in a way, earned it. The filmmakers do the work to make this teaching/learning process, these characters, and this everyday fight feel real and vital. They do.

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