Bad Education (2019)

Bad Education arrives with the sober mien of a film that knows it is based on the largest public school embezzlement in American history, and it conducts itself accordingly. Cory Finley directs Hugh Jackman as Frank Tassone, the beloved Long Island superintendent who diverted millions while polishing the district's national ranking. The machinery is efficient. The performances are precise. It is a crime drama first and a morality tale a distant second, which is precisely the sort of restraint that keeps the classification ledger quiet.

There are, to be fair, some entries worth recording. The film casts Geraldine Viswanathan as Rachel Bhargava, the student reporter who cracks the case, a role modeled on Rebekah Rombom, a white journalist in the source material. Rafael Casal appears in support. This is color-conscious casting of a deliberate kind, inserting diversity the historical record did not supply, and the film never pauses to announce it. Elsewhere, Jackman's Tassone is a closeted gay man with a domestic partner and a secret affair with a younger man, and the film treats this as the character's private architecture, not as a platform. The result is a substantial presence in the narrative without the sermonizing that usually accompanies it.

A female student journalist drives the investigation, and Allison Janney's assistant superintendent is a willing co-conspirator, though the film has no interest in framing either as an argument about patriarchy. The theft is rendered as personal appetite, not as a symptom of a system. Nobody lectures. Nobody explains the moral to the audience. It is, in the end, a well-tailored film about a man who stole from children and kept his pension. The credits roll. The ledger stays mostly blank.

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