The Kindergarten Teacher
Maggie Gyllenhaal: Kind or Kinda Crazy?
In these uncertain times regarding the health and wellbeing of children within the physcical and emotional walls of educational and religious institutions, the timing of The Kindergarten Teacher couldn’t be more pertinent. In light of school shootings, not to mention sexual abuse by teachers and priests, to be a parent sending his/her child off to be cared for by a relative stranger must be terrifying. Which makes the trailer for The Kindergarten Teacher almost as frightening as one for a Saw movie.
Sweet, quiet, unassuming kindergarten teacher Lisa Spinelli both loves and hates her life. She’s in an unfulfilling marriage and tired of being an underpaid, over-glorified babysitter. But every now and then something special happens in the midst of the drudgery. One day Lisa overhears one of her young students, Jimmy (Parker Sevak), spontaneously make up a simple yet, for her, deeply profound poem. She reads it to a professional critic (Gael Garcia Bernal) and he agrees that Lisa just may have stumbled upon a child prodigy along the lines of Mozart.
As played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is turning into one of our greatest actors today, Lisa is at once boring and normal yet verging on totally insane. As she becomes more and more obsessed with little Jimmy, her mind begins to play tricks on her, convincing her that she’s saving the artistic soul of a five year old. She breaks all of the rules of a caretaker, turning more into a predator, scaring everyone around her, including the object of her affection. Is Jimmy the next Walt Whitman? This cautionary tale will certainly make parents think twice about trusting their kids welfare to others.
The Kindergarten Teacher opens October 12th.
