MOVIE REVIEW : TEACHER ‘SYLVIA’ GALVANIZED HER MAORI CLASSROOM

Sylvia Ashton-Warner has always been one of the most passionate figures in the world of education. That quality burns like a laser through “Teacher,” her account of the seeming impossibility of reaching young Maori children in New Zealand in the early 1930s by traditional British teaching methods.

Everything failed, until Ashton-Warner hit upon a system of using “fear words and love words,” a very personal vocabulary that had meaning in these preschoolers’ lives. The same passion burns through “Sylvia” (at the Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion), New Zealand writer-director Michael Firth’s darkly glowing portrait of Ashton-Warner herself during these crucial years.

In a film where we must care for the actress playing Ashton-Warner or see the whole film crumble, Firth has chosen superbly. She is the red-haired Eleanor David, last seen as the hauntingly provocative Maddie in “Comfort and Joy,” complete with Scottish accent and a bent toward kleptomania. That was delicately placed light comedy. This is an illumination of the first experiments of a bold, unfettered spirit, and in both roles the English David soars, and lingers in the mind.

From reading “Teacher” more than 20 years ago when it was first published, I had formed my own, wild notion of what these young Maoris, with names like Lilac and Seven, Pearly and Moana, looked like, and also of their truly remote little town. It is a Rousseau-like jungle, whose dense greens are always ready to take over the straggly, semi-Victorian outpost. But nothing (unless it’s the current edition of the book, crammed with photographs of these glowing faces) prepared me for the film’s children: wriggling, bursting, electric forces of nature. The Auckland-educated Firth had himself been a teacher (in Guyana) and has an almost tangible empathy for these children.

They are being straitjacketed and crushed as Ashton-Warner, (called “Mrs. Henderson” by her students) and her headmaster-teacher husband, Keith Henderson (Tom Wilkinson), arrive with their three small children in this lush New Zealand backwater. It had previously been the bastion of a strict British ex-army officer headmaster and his wife, who have thrown up their hands at the task and are content with ruling with the rod and military discipline.

Ashton-Warner has her own struggles--a nervous breakdown at their last, remote posting; a yearning for contact with people and civilization, and the feeling (common to how many thousands of wives and mothers?) that one day she will see “what used to be her soul gurgling down some plug hole” of enforced domesticity. And the worst fear of all: that she is not at all suited to teaching.

What talents she is sure of lie in the piano, in art, in friendship and, as we see, in carving out a life for herself, her quietly supportive husband and their children in the rudest circumstances. Very slowly we watch these elements join to become her strength and the foundation of her own teaching method. (They are the film’s strengths too: Leonard Rosenman’s subtle and appropriate music, which heightens its mood; fine details of costuming, such as Ashton-Warner’s ‘30s-period print smocks, and of art direction and production design that give us so rooted a sense of all these lives.)

The Hendersons’ friends are district nurse Opal Saunders (the extraordinary Mary Regan, who starred in Firth’s earlier film “Heart of the Stag”) and Aden Morris (Nigel Terry, “Excalibur’s” King Arthur) as the school inspector--a composite of different people in Ashton-Warner’s life. Marvelously cast, beautifully played, these four friends become the fabric of one another’s lives; part of the support system that lets them all function in such seemingly hopeless conditions.

Useless to try to catch these legend-haunted children’s attention with Janet and John, Britain’s Dick and Jane and Spot. Impulsively, Ashton-Warner tries words that galvanize them-- ghost, knife, kiss, beer, fire engine, skellington, Mummy, Daddy. Those work. She plays the piano for them, has them draw, make workbooks of their own. The schoolroom begins to glow with the children’s paintings and with her own until, finally, it’s as if a Maori Gauguin had taken over its walls.

“Sylvia’s” great strength is in doing just what Ashton-Warner did: making learning vivid and impassioned, achieving the same kind of breakthrough that happened with Helen Keller’s “one-word book, ‘ water. ‘ “ Where it lets us down is in leaving a little too much unexplained at the end. Having drawn these characters so well, screenwriters Michele Quill, F. Fairfax and Firth let them tail off too abruptly. It keeps “Sylvia” from the perfectly sustained quality of “Stevie,” for example, but, like “Stevie,” it will most certainly lead audiences to the writings of its electrifying heroine, and that in itself is no small reward. ‘SYLVIA’

An MGM/UA Classics Release of a Southern Light Pictures, Cinepro presentation. Producers Don Reynolds, Michael Firth. Director Firth. Screenplay Michele Quill, F. Fairfax, Firth, based on “Teacher” and “I Passed This Way” by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. Camera Ian Paul. Editor Michael Horton. Costumes Anne McKay. Set designs Gary Hansen. Original score Leonard Rosenman. Art director Kirsten Shouler. Sound Graham Morris. With Eleanor David, Nigel Terry, Tom Wilkinson, Mary Regan, Martyn Sanderson, Terence Cooper.

Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.

Times-rated: Family.