There is something insurmountably flawed about a cinema verité documentary shot by a female director about and taking place primarily in an all-boys school. Any woman would stick out like a sore thumb, especially one with a video camera and a big boom. How can we possibly trust that what we see unfold on screen is anything but fake or staged, when there is no possible way for the film to be shot unobtrusively in order to ensure that the scenes are purely authentic. At times, When We Were Boys seems horribly stiff and forced; it would be nearly impossible for director Sarah Goodman to maintain the necessary status of fly-on-the-wall in such a situation. If you can’t just take my word for it, take it from my own personal experience. I spent my formative junior high and high schools years at an all-girls institution. And believe me, if a foreign male entered the school grounds, even a 300-pound pock-faced man, everyone would know.

When We Were Boys follows boys at Toronto’s Royal St. George’s College as they progress from grade 8 to grade 10. In particular, we follow Noah, an extremely handsome young St. George’s student, who hails from one of the richest families in the school. His classmates bully him because of his wealth, not physically but with words, calling him “mastercard” or by borrowing money from him which they never intend to repay. Yes, we get it, poor little rich boy.

If you look for the clichéd in a story, it’s almost always possible to find it, especially in a high school documentary. Last year’s documentary hit about high school kids, American Teen, also fell to the same fate: searching for the clichéd, finding it, and lacking any form of insight that one might have hoped for from a documentary about high school kids instead of a fantasy film à la John Hughes (Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, etc). Goodman looks for the clichéd and she finds it. In grade 8, Noah sings soprano in the school choir; by grade 10 he’s become an alto. Shocker: his voice dropped after puberty. The boys read Lord of the Flies in English class and are treated to lectures by their teachers about how the cruelty towards Piggie isn’t so far off from reality; Goodman tries to parallel this with events in the boys’ lives.

There are a few scenes which are marginally shocking. Most notably, in an assembly, a guest speaker at the school tells the boys that they can either “play it safe and go to McGill and become a doctor or lawyer, or they can really do something with their lives”. I wanted to kill that guy. Of course, I’m no stranger to talks about how I’m “privileged” and going to be a “world leader”; this was token fare at my high school. But going to McGill and becoming a doctor or lawyer was almost exactly what our school wanted us to do, if we didn’t have the common decency to go into arts. Only a rebel (like me, ha!) would choose engineering or physics or computer science. In another shocking scene, a boy gets suspended for helping to protect his friend when his friend’s cell phone goes off in class. Stern talking to? Sure. Detention? Maybe. But one-week suspension? That’s insane. But at least this helps to portray just how stodgy things are within these concrete walls. The teachers all dress in full suits and ties and the boys, in their uniforms, are equally well-attired. My teachers were well dressed but we were all a little bit more laid back about the whole dress code. In another scene, Noah goes to a barbershop to get his haircut, but this barber shop looks like a place where 60-year-old billionaires on Wall Street would get their hair trimmed: to say it’s a fancy little place would not emphasize the point enough.

But for the most part, Sarah Goodman misses the subtleties. If she wanted to emphasize the difficulties of class wars even within a privileged environment, she missed the key points. There are status symbols. When I was in high school, there was a great distinction between those with iPods and those without. Now that distinction might be those with iPhones and those without. Though we certainly see these privileged boys with the latest in technology: from Apple computers, to iPhones, to the latest video console and Guitar Hero. In my school, we had rules about jewellery – it was not allowed – rules that were constantly broken to allow girls to distinguish themselves as those “with” Tiffany’s bracelets or necklaces or diamond earrings. These are subtle symbols that don’t get talked about but are constantly there. And they would hardly be unique to a private school, though perhaps more pronounced as subtle displays of wealth. Why not focus in on the fact that the boys are drinking San Pellegrino water with their lunch, a sure sign of the privileged.

The film is also pretty tame. We see little talk of the discovery of sex, masturbation, and insecurities therein. The boys go to school dances and seem to have no trouble easily finding both girls that they know and girls that are willing to dance with them. My recollection of high school dances involved a lot more awkward standing around. There is also little acknowledgement of the incestuous relationships between boys schools and their sister girls schools; the boys and girls will form a social circle and systematically swap around and date one another, within that snobby circle of privilege. We also don’t get to see or understand what interaction with girls is like for these boys who have spent the majority of their childhood starved from female presence. The less you see the opposite sex, the more important it suddenly becomes. How does their schooling in an all boys environment affect their friendships both with boys and girls? How does it affect their relationships? Are there additional pressures for them to “score” with girls or to have dates or a girlfriend? Are these intensified by the testosterone-rich environment?

And where are their parents? We see these boys placed in homes of privilege, with fancy furniture, big televisions, swimming pools in their backyards, and other such signs of privilege, but we never see them interact with their parents. Do they experience additional pressure from their parents to achieve academic success? Do they live in a highly intellectually stimulating environment? Are their parents ever even home? Do their mothers work? Or are their fathers’ the breadwinners?

The film plays little attention to how friendships change and to the differences in perspectives amongst the boys. We find out that Noah lost his best friend, after the fact, so we only see his friend in a somewhat forced confrontation towards the end of the film when he asks him – in front of a video camera, no less, in his house – what happened to their friendship. We never see his friends’ perspective, however. We don’t see how that loss of their friendship really affected them. And we don’t see how they compensated for it in other aspects of their lives.

There are so many interesting questions to tackle, so many concepts to explore, so many answers one would expect to gain only from a documentary. But instead of showing us what growing up is really like, and giving us some new sociological insight as Michael Apted once did in his Up Series, Sarah Goodman goes straight for the obvious clichés. Every scene is supposed to be pure fly-on-the-wall. There are no interviews. The boys never talk about their feelings or experiences or how they make sense of the world. In a film with such an obvious flaw – a female director hanging around in an all-boys school – how can we trust the limited scenes that we do see? Nevertheless, it is a piece of our culture in this city, and it’s interesting to watch boys grow up, even if we only see their clichéd maturation, in their bubble of privilege in Toronto. Occasional scenes are interesting and Noah is extremely likeable and sympathetic. It helps that he’s got the looks of a young heartthrob. It might be worth a watch on the documentary channel, but don’t rush out and see it if it hits theatres.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.