Week of Review - Apt Pupil (1998)

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I want to be upfront here; I went into Apt Pupil with “they can’t all be winners” mentality.  I’m aware that digging through forgotten C-list cinema is by no means a sure thing and there’s every chance that among the genuine gems like Needful Things and The Mangler you’re going to come upon stuff that’s problematic or dated like Thinner.  However, I was in no way prepared for just how terrible Apt Pupil was going to be, this movie makes Thinner look like The Shining.  

It’s a film that I fully expected to be dated, tasteless, problematic, uncomfortable and more and while it was absolutely all of those things it was somehow so much less as well. 

It’s a bad movie I’m kind of shocked we ever stopped talking about yet also completely unsurprised it’s been swallowed up by the dust bin of history and banished by its own mediocrity.  I mean, when you’ve got a movie about a teen boy sociopath who forms an unsettling relationship with an old Nazi and it’s directed by Bryan Singer the last thing you expect it to be is so damn boring. 

Released in 1998, which is to say directly in between the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995 and the Columbine Shooting in 1999, Apt Pupil stars the late Brad Renfro as Todd Bowden, a high school senior, who discovers his neighbor, played by Ian McKellen, is actually a Nazi war criminal.  Armed with this knowledge and evidence Teen decides to blackmail Old Nazi into telling him tales of concentration camps because Teen is a proto-Dexter style sociopath. 

This is probably one of the weakest aspects of the film, that despite being slathered in Nazi imagery and ephemera nobody in the movie seems to care at all about Nazism.  Teen isn’t portrayed as anti-Semitic and his obsession with the concentration camps doesn’t seem to go beyond the standard pulp sociopathy you’d find in any given prestige TV show these days.  Actually, my first instinct was to compare it to the Hannibal franchise (especially given the Nazi stuff in Hannibal Rising), which gave me cause to remember Silence of the Lambs had a HUGE impact on ‘90s thrillers and Apt Pupil definitely felt like painful Hannibal backwash. 

Circling back to the whole “we used Nazism strictly for shock value” side of things, this is both incredibly offensive and pretty damaging to any point the movie might’ve been trying to make.  They constantly pepper this holocaust imagery into the film as part of the Teen having night terrors about Old Nazi’s stories but why?  It’s not as if he ever exhibits guilt about his blackmail or chooses to stop hearing the stories, we even see him engage in animal abuse at one point so it’s not as if he’s somehow a good guy who just made a mistake. 

It just feels confused, like the movie needs these scary hallucination sequences to sell itself as a thriller because there’s actually very little plot here.  Teen blackmails Old Nazi for about 1/3^rd of the movie, then his grades start slipping so Old Nazi blackmails Teen into studying (this is an incredibly odd plot cul-de-sac,) then Old Nazi has a heart attack after attempting to murder a homeless man and is recognized in the hospital.  There is no arc to this movie, no lessons are learned and nobody changes, it’s just a bunch of stuff that happens. 

It’s not even as if the movie is some great acting showcase.  Most of the folks on hand are on auto-pilot, most notably Sir Ian McKellen who always exudes an air of “going through the motions.”  It’s also not as if the direction is anything to write home about, it’s all fairly middling and of TV movie quality with none of the handcrafted aesthetics of The Mangler or The Dark Half.  Bizarrely, the only person who actually turns in a memorable performance is David Schwimmer as Edward French, Teen’s guidance counselor. 

I have exactly no idea why Schwimmer elected to do this movie given he was still riding high on Friends right now aside from maybe hoping to show some greater range.  He definitely has it, though, as despite only being in the movie for three scenes total he’s absolutely one of the most memorable parts, to the point I kind of wish we’d just gotten a whole movie about Schwimmer as a kind-hearted, tough but fair, guidance counselor.  His final scene actually features him figuring out Teen’s relationship to the Nazi and threatening to expose him but Teen puts him in his place by threatening to make false allegations of sexual harassment against him, which brings me neatly to Bryan Singer.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, Bryan Singer is one of the frankly disappointing but in no way surprising large number of filmmakers who’ve come under greater public scrutiny over allegations of sexual harassment.  I’m saying “allegations” here but this stuff is so concrete Singer was actually forced to flee production on the recent film Bohemian Rhapsody over it so it’s probably a bit stronger than the term “allegations” is often used to imply. 

You probably have your own feelings about separating the man from the art but personally I take it on a case-by-case basis and in this case I don’t really think there’s any room for separation.  Aside from the fact, the movie isn’t very good its focus on teen boys is incredibly upsetting to the say the least and the ending of our “””hero””” getting away with his Nazi flirtations via false allegations leaves a decidedly bad taste in your mouth.  Finally, a lot of the first allegations against Singer came from extras in a shower scene in this movie so any defense about separating art from artist kind of crumbles when the art was exactly how he ended up committing his crimes. 

In the end, I’m not entirely sure why I actually did Apt Pupil.  I guess it’s that it’s a kind of bad that feels like it doesn’t deserve to be forgotten, a kind of bad we should still be bringing up today as the perfect bad example.  Everything about the movie stinks of wasted potential at best and artless empty spectacle at worse.  The idea of watching a young man’s radicalization to violent rightwing views in a time before the Internet sounds like it should be at least interest and it’s not as if the cast is poor, it’s just a movie that isn’t concerned with pushing any boundaries or doing anything unique.  It’s the tamest of shock films hoping that young white male sociopathy is enough to get a rise out of the viewership while still affording him the considerations of a hero, in other words, it’s a garbage movie made by a pretty garbage director. 

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