This season’s budget-busting megamovie, Law School: First Year, is an epic coming of age story in the grand tradition of The Paper Chase and Legally Blonde. But what could have been a tight, tense psychological drama of high stakes and naked competition is ruined by sloppy pacing and a hurry-up-and-wait plot that keeps you on the edge of your seat for eight months while nothing much happens. And since First Year is only being shown in un-fast-forward-able ultra-IMAX immersive 4D, this might just be the longest cinema experience since The Two Towers.
Considering the fact that just going to see this movie will eat up a year of your life, it’s impressive that it feels like it’s over so quickly. The agonizing exceptions are the study scenes, which are bad enough to sink the movie all on their own. The screen-time-is-real-time gimmick is great for exciting shit like Crank and 16 Blocks and 24, but watching some chump read a casebook for a thousand fucking hours is actually even more boring than it sounds. Haven’t these people ever heard of Eisenstein? Or seen Rocky? It’s called a montage, guys. Jesus.
To make matters worse, First Year has more endings than Clue. By the time Follies is over and everyone has (or doesn’t have) their summer jobs figured out, there’s nothing left to keep the audience interested for remaining two and a half months of the movie. Half-hearted attempts to hold our interest through the long denouement, like Law Ball and April exams, feel like that tacked-on scene at the end of Lincoln where everybody in the theatre knows how the story is going to end, but we still have to go through the motions and pretend to be surprised. The President’s been shot! We all got Bs and jobs and coke habits and our marriages failed! I’m soooo surprised!
But that’s not to say the movie doesn’t have pathos. It has loads of pathos. This is the most affecting little-fish-big-pond flick since Finding Nemo. There’s almost nobody in First Year who doesn’t experience some variation on the theme of ego burn, identity shock, and deliberate, sometimes traumatic re-invention. The symbolism is a little on the nose at times—the faculty itself is undergoing a parallel transformation as it tries to leave the Canadian pond and start swimming with the US sharks, and you don’t have to be Roger Ebert to notice that the new grading system, new price tag, and new building are supposed to work as a metaphor for the students’ experience. There’s some real dramatic potential to be tapped here, but it’s hard to care about the fall of any particular erstwhile nerd king, because a part of you will just hate them all.
First Year has a staggeringly large cast—almost 200 characters limp their way into the end credits—but only a few have more than a few lines of dialogue, and most of those are pretty much indistinguishable from the other 15 insufferable diva-pedants who enjoy speaking roles. Like a Bizarro World Breakfast Club, First Year answers the unasked question of what happens when you take all the anal-retentive, type-A nerds you knew in high school and put them in a room together. Shockingly, they study a lot. And they talk about boring crap like moral blameworthiness and OCIs all the goddamn time. (Speaking of which, don’t see this movie because you think it sounds like The Hunger Games. Notwithstanding the competition for scarce professional resources, whatever gladiatorial spirit might have animated these people at the beginning of the film is obliterated by months of learned helplessness and false courtesy. You haven’t seen eyes this dead since that scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise gets his eyeballs back in a plastic bag.)
In the end, this movie is less To Kill a Mockingbird and more One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Like the graffito says, even if you win the race, you’re still a rat. Likewise in law school: even if you’re the coolest law student in the world, you’re still just Jack Nicholson, pretending to enjoy the electroshock therapy and hoping your best friend will remember to smother you to death with a pillow before making his escape.
Expect to leave the theatre wondering about the stories that weren’t told. There’s a huge supporting cast of what seem like truly great characters, whose genuine passion, intelligence, and integrity light up their scenes and their world. Off-screen, we imagine, they pursue goals of their own, not prestige or validation, and they have hobbies and interests and convincing answers when hip musicians at parties ask them, “So, what do you do besides study law?” They radiate verve and pluck and moral fibre—enough to make the whole enterprise seem almost worthwhile.
Unfortunately, this movie is not about those people. But I have high hopes for the sequel.
