“What will your verse be?”

Being a huge fan of Robin Williams both as a human and as an actor, Dead Poets Society has been on my watchlist for quite a while now. Good Will Hunting is one of my favorite movies of all time, so knowing that he plays a somewhat similar role here, that being a mentor, really caught my interest. I was almost positive that I was going to walk away from this film with extremely positive thoughts, but I have to be honest, I was pretty disappointed by it, though it still definitely has a lot going for it, which I’ll get into first.

For one, it can be a very inspiring story as a whole. Whether you are into poetry or not, there is something here that really does connect deep down with the human soul and is pretty powerful as well. This movie makes it clear that we don’t just live for the sake of it; we all have passion deep down, whether that be for things as simple as love or our dreams. Along with that, it’s very poignant as well. Not a lot of the emotional payoffs in Dead Poets Society, I feel, are completely earned (which I’ll get to), but still hit decently hard either way.

What I definitely wasn’t disappointed in here was Robin Williams’ performance as the main professor, John Keating. His ability to not only control the screen but also control your heart as well is so amazing to me; he will truly always be one of the greatest actors to ever do it. Dead Poets Society is most definitely very far away from being one of my favorite movies, but there are still a number of scenes, as well as pieces of dialogue from Williams, that I won’t forget from this film, even if they were fewer and farther between than I may have hoped going in.

What made it hard for me to connect with the movie as much as I wanted to, though, were the characters and how they were written. There is a huge group of them, with three of them being somewhat of the main stars, and it made it really difficult for me to get truly invested in any of them. The main character of the three is definitely Neil Perry, played by Robert Sean Leonard. His character was by far the most disappointing part of the movie for me, which is what I’ll get into next.

Throughout the course of the story, Neil develops a passion for acting, but what holds him back is his father, who is extremely dead set on him going on a specific path in life. What disappointed me was how this wasn’t explored nearly enough for me to really care all that much. Neil hadn’t ever acted before the movie started and says at one point that he had just had an interest in acting, but all of a sudden becomes obsessed with it and eventually tries out for a main role in a play after his professor indirectly gets him motivated enough to. This is extremely hard to go into without getting into spoilers, but what I’ll say is this: I felt like the movie didn’t focus nearly enough on this, even though it was clearly supposed to be the most compelling part of the story, which made the eventual payoff not really hit hard much at all. At least not as much as it should have.

This next criticism is definitely a bit more of a personal one, but it affects my view on the movie as a whole either way. One of the other main characters, another student named Knox Overstreet, early on develops a crush on a girl who is already dating someone else. What really bothered me about this was how it was portrayed, leaning hard into lustful territory, and I never got the sense that the writing was condemning or disapproving of it at all. The guy that the girl is dating is very clearly portrayed as being a jerk, but adultery is still adultery, and with how significant this part played in the story and how much it took of the runtime, it just honestly really rubbed me the wrong way.

I just have to say, too, that in addition to the group of characters being so large, I just didn’t really care a whole lot about any of them a whole lot. In fact, I honestly think that a lot of them were overacted to the point where they were kind of just your average cinematic version of a school kid, so much so that they all not only started to feel like the same characters, but actually began to be a bit obnoxious. Besides maybe a few of them, I couldn’t really give a very good description of them if I were forced to.

I understand that it’s probably kind of weird that I still gave this a positive rating, considering that I had more negative than positive to say, but there was still a cinematic depth to the story, even if parts of it really frustrated me, which kept the movie going. It’s also really hard not to like a movie that Robin Williams is in, and that I think we can all agree on.