Late in the movie, as Frank Tassone’s world begins to slowly crumble around him, he scrambles into his office to find an oblivious mother and her son. He’s anxious. He’s stressed. He has no time for yet another parent with yet another demand. But then, there is a look of acknowledgement on his face, and he stops for just a minute, for the sake of the child. The mother, who insists that her underachieving son is actually gifted, makes the boy read a statement out loud to Tassone. The boy, who isn’t a particularly skilled reader, keeps stumbling over the word “accelerated”. No matter how many times the word is repeated at him, he just can’t bring himself to say it. It’s at that point when Frank finally snaps. He digs deep, he channels all of his rage and anger and and anxiety into one brilliant teaching moment. It is magnificently brought to life by Hugh Jackman. It is everything we need to know about his character. And it leaves us even more conflicted on how to feel about him.
Humans sure are complicated. Difficult to analyse or understand. We are complex characters consisting of many different and connected parts. A sum total of all our secrets and lies, our personal traumas, our joys and disappointments. We are a bundle of conflicting motivations. Neither all good or completely bad, and with the exception of maybe Mother Teresa and Adolf Hitler, most of us lie somewhere on a spectrum, moving back and forth with every decision that we make.
The law exists to keep us honest. And by that objective standard, Frank Tassone deserves to be in jail. But how, in the grand scheme of things, do we judge his worth as a human being? By the money he stole? Or by the thousands of lives that he changed for the better?
There are no easy answers. And HBO’s Bad Education doesn’t try to give you any. What it does, however, is present a compelling version of events.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Going into this, I didn’t know anything about Frank Tassone or Pam Gluckin and their shenanigans.
I knew Bad Education was a HBO production, that it had Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney as its leads, and that it was inspired by real events. HBO, you see, excels at making this sort of talky, mid-budget, “based on a true story”, human drama. Paterno. Recount. Winchell. RKO 281. Bessie. Behind the Candelabra. Gia. The Laramie Project. The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom. I could go on. Needless to say, they’ve got it down to a fine art, and I was all in.
The story here takes place in the Roslyn school district in the early aughts, at a time when hip meant using a Motorola Razr and scandals still spread by way of newspaper articles. The movie tells of school administrators Frank Tassone and Pam Gluckin who, over the course of a decade, misappropriated and stole over $11 million from the district. It would be the biggest ever school embezzlement case in U.S. history.
Their crimes are uncovered in the movie by student reporter Rachel Bhargava (Geraldine Viswanathan) who, in one early scene, is told by Tassone himself to not just write puff pieces but ask hard questions and do real reporting.
Mike Makowsky’s screenplay is rather brilliant in its understatement, where every revelation, major and minor, unfolds deliberately, with very little drama or fanfare. I enjoyed how the movie revealed these individuals to us, by cunningly exploiting our affection for both Jackman and Janney, and using it to hide their characters’ sociopathies. I enjoyed how the movie is littered with clues as to who these individuals really are and how our own biases prevent us from seeing the truth. Until it’s too late.
Makowsky, who grew up in Roslyn and was one of Tassone’s students, has a point to make with Bad Education. That the crimes perpetrated by Frank and Pam can’t just be explained away as the misdeeds of two people who were greedy and opportunistic, but the consequence of our amoral pursuit of money and success. Makowsky blames society as much as he does Frank and Pam. He blames the parents who wanted to live in a prestigious school district because it meant higher property values and better Ivy League acceptance rates. He calls them out for being complicit in the crime.
In one particularly moving moment, Rachel confronts her father about having lost his job for insider trading. She asks him if he was, in anyway, involved. To which he replies: “No I wasn’t. Not at any point in time, I promise you.” He continues: “I didn’t say anything. I could have. But I didn’t. And that’s something I live with.” The scene is used to reinforce Rachel’s decision to do the right thing and publish her story. But it’s also a rebuke, to everyone in Roslyn who sat back, reaped the rewards, and said nothing.
My one criticism of the movie is that it tries to do everything. In trying to be a high-school version of Spotlight, as well as a compelling true-crime story, and also a morality tale about the complexities of human behaviour, in trying to give us so much context and backstory to so many characters, the movie is forced to abandon those threads as it approaches the end of its runtime. Allison Janney, Ray Romano, and especially Geraldine Viswanathan, give such fantastic performances, playing such fascinating characters, that when the movie shifts its focus back to Jackman, I felt shortchanged.
Bad Education does such good work in setting up its players only to drop the ball when it came to resolving each of their arcs. Not that I was looking to be spoon-fed in any way. I just felt that the movie, which felt like it was building up to something, never quite reached its crescendo. Somewhere, in a folder, on a backup drive, in one of HBO’s server farms, I’m hoping there exists a great moment of reckoning between Jackman and Janney. Now that would be a truly Emmy worthy showdown.
With that one nit picked, let me get back to that question at the core of Bad Education. What of Frank Tassone? How do we reconcile his crimes, his self-entitled smugness, with his compassion, his skill, and his generosity? Does his corruption undo a lifetime of good work?
In the hands of lesser filmmakers, the answer would be a simple “yes”. A lesser actor would have played Frank Tassone as a smarmy crook. A lesser film would make it far easier for us to be judgmental. But by creating a character who is as flawed as he is human, by holding up a mirror to the rest of us, Bad Education makes the point that we aren’t the heroes, but the anti-heroes, of our own story.
Bad Education
HBO
108 minutes
Director: Cory Finley
Screenplay: Mike Makowsky
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney, Ray Romano, and Geraldine Viswanathan
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