Waiting for "Superman" Review

It's become increasingly common for documentaries to serve as rallying points for various causes.  An Inconvenient Truth; Food, Inc.; and The Cove all ended with messages about how we, the audience, can help create change.  These films have all been successful to some degree - even if they don't inspire action from every viewer, they at least start conversation and raise awareness, necessary steps to solving the issues plaguing our world.  I myself devour these sorts of movies (with the exception of this year's dismal Countdown to Zero), getting passionately angry about what happens, though I've yet to be moved to action.  The closest I've come was texting "DOLPHIN" to whatever number The Cove presented me at film's end.  Waiting for "Superman," however, hits a little too close to home for me to simply get angry about and then turn away from.

It doesn't hit close to home because I went through bad schools, because I didn't.  I was fortunate enough to go through a fantastic public school system where I only had to suffer two truly awful teachers.  It's this contrast that made the film more horrifying to me than any of the scary movies that will be filling cinemas by the end of the month.  A couple of my cousins, my mom, and my brother are all teachers, and they're all great at their jobs.  They love their kids, take an interest in their lives, and truly make differences through their work.  They make learning fun and bring their work home with them at night; it's an incredible amount of devotion, such a load that I don't know if I could personally handle the job myself.

But the kids deserve it.  It's sad that we live in a country where we can't even guarantee a quality education for our kids.  Teachers sit and read newspapers through a period and can't be fired because of a skewed tenure system put in place by unions.  The best schools don't have enough resources to reach out to all the kids who want to attend, so they hold lotteries where dreams come true and are crushed within a single moment.  The system is broken, and in this case, it's not just disappointing; it's an emergency.  This is the future of our country, and we're letting millions of kids slip through the cracks because... why?  Is it laziness?  Stubbornness?  A disgustingly warped definition of what it means to be American?  It's impossible to say, exactly, which makes it a hard problem to treat.  Because, as Dr. Horrible says, "The fish rots from the head," we can't be satisfied with treating a symptom; we have to take the battle to the core of the system.

Davis Guggenheim's phenomenal film does a beautiful job of putting faces on our educational epidemic.  There are many facts - most of them disturbing - presented throughout the film (as you'd expect when watching a documentary), but they become more than just bullet points as we witness the children who are trapped in a system that can offer them only a transitory glimmer of hope when it should be giving them a guarantee of quality education.  Guggenheim managed to find some of the cutest kids in the country, and their innocence, their undiluted trains of thought, resonate deeper than even the most upsetting studies of how education works (or more often, doesn't work) in our country.

Waiting for "Superman" is the most important film of the year.  There's no reason to miss it.  The film chronicles the action being taken by some of the most prominent names in the field of education, but it also demonstrates how most of these attempts at change have failed.  When a problem is this big, one person isn't enough; you can start doing your part by buying a ticket and telling your friends to do the same.  If you aren't touched by the stories that unfold, you have a heart of stone.  More likely, by the time the credits roll, you'll be sick of waiting for a hero that isn't coming and feel compelled to become that hero yourself.