With Julie Walters, Michael Caine, and Others

"Educating Rita"

Director: Lewis Gilbert

Screenwriter: Willy Russell

Released: 1983

With Julie Walters, Michael Caine, and others

Rita (Julie Walters) is a twenty-six years old hairdresser from Liverpool who has decided to get an education. Not the sort of education that would get her just a better job or more pay, but an education that would open up for her a whole new world--a liberal education. Rita wants to be a different person, and live an altogether different sort of life than she has lived so far.

She enrolls in the Open University, a government program that allows non-traditional students to get the kind of higher education that used to be reserved more or less for the offspring of the upper classes, and mainly for male students at that. "Educating Rita" describes the trials and transformations that the young hairdresser has to go through to develop from a person with hardly any formal schooling at all into a student who passes her university exams with ease and distinction. In the course of telling this story, the film also suggests what the essence of a liberal education may be.

The story is presented in the form of a comedy, a comedy that revolves around the personal and pedagogical relationship between Rita and her main teacher, Dr. Frank Bryant (Michael Caine). Frank Bryant teaches comparative literature, and it is his job to prepare Rita for her exams. Unfortunately, Frank Bryant has lost all enthusiasm for his academic field and its related teaching duties. He loathes most of his regular students, and the main function of the rows of classical works that still fill the bookshelves in his office is to hide the whiskey bottles without which he is not able to get through the day and the semesters anymore. When he teaches his regular classes he is frequently drunk, and in response to a student's complaint that students are not learning much about literature in Bryant's class, the burned-out teacher gruffly advises: "Look, the sun is shining, and you're young. What are you doing in here? Why don't you all go out and do something? Why don't you go and make love--or something?"

Frank Bryant is a disenchanted intellectual who has no real use anymore for literature, culture, or the life of the mind. Introducing working people in particular to the world of higher education seems utterly pointless to him. When he finds himself assigned as the primary tutor for Rita he remarks to a fellow-instructor: "Why a grown adult wants to come to this place after putting in a hard day's work is totally beyond me." He himself would much rather go to a pub, than spend the evening instructing some disadvantaged student.

When Rita appears at Frank's office for their first tutorial session, however, the two take a sort of liking to each other. Rita is bright, vivacious, charming, and good looking to boot. "Why didn't you walk in here twenty years ago?" Frank exclaims. He is twice her age and looks somewhat disheveled (like a "geriatric hippie," as Rita puts it), but he impresses his new student by his irreverent humor and easy-going manner. Trying to deflate her respect for his seemingly impressive academic accomplishments, he says: "I am afraid, Rita, that you will find that there is much less to me than meets the eye." To which Rita replies: "See, y' can say dead clever things like that, can't y? I wish I could talk like that. It's brilliant." In spite of Frank's initial attempt to excuse himself from his assignment and to repair to a pub, he eventually gives in to Rita's pleading and agrees to be her instructor.

Frank wants to know why Rita has "suddenly" decided to get an education. She has a secure job, after all, and there is no pressure on her to enroll in a program of higher education. Rita answers that her desire is not sudden: "I've been realizin' for ages that I was, y' know, slightly out of step. I'm twenty-six. I should have had a baby by now; everyone expects it. I'm sure me husband thinks I'm sterile. He was moanin' all the time, y' know, 'Come off the pill, let's have a baby.' I told him I'd come off it, just to shut him up. But I'm still on it. See, I don't want to

baby yet. I want to

discover myself first. Do you understand that?"

Frank says that he understands, but he is never quite convinced that he is doing the right thing in turning Rita into the kind of person who is acceptable to and approved by the academic world. He fears that too much of her original charming personality will be destroyed in the process. The comical paradox of the situation is that Rita desires exactly what Frank does not value anymore: the clever speech of academics, the culture and tastes of the upper classes, and an escape from the trivia of down-to-earth life into a realm of ideas that seem more significant than the preoccupations of ordinary people. The things that Frank appreciates these days, Rita already has in overabundance: spontaneous feelings, a unique personality, and a solid grounding in the unpretentious world of basic work and simple pleasures. While in the coming weeks and months he succeeds in teaching Rita how to read and analyze literature in a scholarly way, and to express her insights in well-argued essays, Frank never loses the nagging feeling that he is deforming Rita as much as he is educating her. What slowly emerges as a result of his tutorials, as far as he is concerned, is not Rita' s true self, but a pretentious mask and faÐ*ade that may be desirable for a certain class of people, but that are hardly worth the sacrifices that Rita is making in order to acquire them.

Rita's progress in her academic education does not come easy. The main obstacles she faces come from her working class background and her husband Denny. Denny has very traditional ideas about the social role of a good woman. He does not only fail to support her educational efforts, but even obstructs them wherever he can. He feels--not without reason--that he is slowly losing control over his wife, and he bitterly accuses her of thinking that he and her family are "not good enough" for her anymore. Rita's father sides with her husband; for one thing, he nastily chides her for not having produced any grandchildren for him. Indeed, almost everything in her environment seems to conspire to keep her where, according to conventional wisdom, she belongs. The smoldering marital crisis comes to a head when Denny discovers that Rita