August 19–26, 1999

movie shorts

Teaching Mrs. Tingle

Written and directed by Kevin Williamson
A Dimension Films release

Consider the view of Kevin Williamson, presently king of all he surveys. As writer of the Screams, I Know What You Did Last Summer and the WB’s hugely popular Dawson’s Creek, he has spread out before him a vast space of yes. It’s all possibility, rife with money and talent and hope and consumption. He is, in a word, the king of mediated teenager-ness.

According to the people who would appear to be lining up to finance Williamson’s projects, he has a special gift: At 34, he taps into high schoolers’ worries and delights, updating his own memories enough that the images and ideas seem relevant and meaningful to an audience more than a little used to being duped, spindled, categorized and targeted. The fact that his scripts do not condescend to their presumed viewers makes Williamson unusual in a business that assumes all consumers are easy. With Teaching Mrs. Tingle, Williamson steps into the much-talked-about next level: He’s directing a studio-financed and -distributed feature, based on what seems to be his first script, devised some years ago when he moved from New Bean, NC to L.A., land of very.

Not unlike The Faculty, Williamson’s last high school horror script, this one reimagines the monumental awfulness of teachers granted far too much power over the average student’s life. Teaching Mrs. Tingle (originally titled Killing Mrs. Tingle, but renamed after the Columbine shootings) is less grandly and traditionally scary: Mrs. Tingle (Helen Mirren) is not from outer space and she’s not equipped with literal tentacles or nifty special effects. Instead, this teacher embodies a banal if imperious evil: She deliberately damages her students emotionally and materially because she can. Or more precisely, she flunks them for aspiring to surpass her own desperate, go-nowhere small-town existence.

With Mrs. Tingle’s arc so clearly in place — she will be taught a lesson — the rest of the plot follows a predictable but also perverse course. Immediately, she’s out to get Leigh Ann Watson (Katie Holmes, best known, so far, as the consummately vulnerable and adorable Joey, object of creek-bound Dawson’s undying desire). Grandsboro High senior Leigh Ann is painfully perfect, daughter to hardworking and plastic-name-tagged waitress Faye (Lesley Ann Warren), earnest, dedicated and up for a college scholarship if only she can get an A in history class. But it’s because Leigh Ann’s motive for grade-grubbing is so patently noble — to provide her defeated-by-life, chain-smoking mother with a vicarious ticket out of town — that she ironically has nowhere to go. Her purity and goodness make her boring, which means that she depends on other students and circumstances to make her watchable.

When Mrs. Tingle unfairly accuses her of cheating, Leigh Ann goes to the teacher’s creepy Victorian house at night to plead her case (surely an unlikely scenario, but who’s counting?), accompanied by her best friend Jo Lynn (Marisa Coughlan) and the class derelict and beautiful boy Luke (Barry Watson). Events and emotions escalate, and Mrs. Tingle ends up spending much of the film in her mannish pajamas (the frightening, stereotypically adolescent notion that prudishness = lesbianness is not addressed coherently here), tied to her bedposts, while the kids ponder their suddenly dire predicament. Mrs. T, meanwhile, tries cajoling, seducing or browbeating them in order to get free and punish her tormentors with all the cruelty and brutality she can muster.

There’s no neat way out of this situation for any of them, which means that the script gets increasingly unwieldy and bizarre. It’s not so much that it doesn’t make sense — the story manages a kind of internal logic — but the characters seem to fall into movie-like poses more than they follow their own possibilities. Save for Jo Lynn’s weird-ass and out-of-place, but oddly charming, rendition of Linda Blair’s bed-flopping, the kids seem to flounder between a tedious lack of imagination (jealous infighting or sexual acting out when you expect it, that is, when their situation seems most precarious) and outrageous plot conveniences (Mrs. T’s secret lover, a coach played by typecast-bumbler Jeffrey Tambor, apparently can’t tell the difference between her and Jo Lynn when he’s wearing a blindfold). This general flatness undermines what the movie does almost well, namely, take high school anxieties about omnipotent teachers seriously. Such creatures exist — we have all known them — but Mrs. Tingle’s learning curve makes her less threatening than pathetic and dreary.

And the kids. They spend the bulk of their screen time doggedly discussing their options and non-options (in a way that unsurprisingly recalls Dawson’s Creek, where all the talk is actually part of its charm). But Leigh Ann, Jo Lynn and Luke end up in an unexpected nowhere, like the script just bails on them. They and their audience deserve better.

—Cindy Fuchs