A Sentimental Education

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

CONRACK

Directed by MARTIN RITT

Screenplay by IRVING RAVETCH and HARRIET FRANK JR.

The spirit behind Conrack is so relentlessly idealistic in tone and uplifting in intent that one feels vaguely guilty for not responding to the film generously and forgivingly. Not many movies these days are so obviously made by nice people acting on their best instincts. In the end, however, the steady drip-drip-drip of the milk of human kindness proves to be indistinguishable from the Chinese water torture.

Based on The Water Is Wide, Pat Conroy's memoir of the year he spent teaching in an all-black elementary school on a backward island off the South Carolina coast, the film features paradisiacal vistas, an enormously engaging performance by Jon Voight in the title role ("Conrack" is the way his students insisted on mispronouncing Conroy's name)--and a profound shortage of dramatic conflict. The children, needless to say, are adorable. They are rendered all the more touching by the superintendent of an inhumane school system and an inflexible principal (the former represented by Hume Cronyn in one of his patented portrayals of the small in spirit; the latter played with a not unsympathetic strength by Madge Sinclair). Many of the children cannot spell their names; none know the name of the ocean that surrounds them. The surf regularly claims lives among them because no one--until Conroy--has taught them to swim.

Conroy is a late-blooming free spirit who understands that his charges are unreachable through conventional pedagogy, and perhaps are already fatally damaged by it. He is willing to try everything from nature walks to wrestling matches to awaken them. Alternately putting himself and them on, cussing and intoning poetry, playing Beethoven records and old Hollywood pirate movies for them, he has an energy and exuberance that are infectious both to pupils and audience.

But they are also wearying. The movie Conroy is unafflicted by the moments of despair that overtook the real one and made his efforts heroic. Finally fired for continually bucking the system, Conroy in his book had the grace to wonder if his intervention had not done more harm than good. Perhaps it was cruel to elevate hopes to a level impossible of realization.

The movie Conroy has no such qualms. In the film's most egregious invention, he hires a sound truck to tour white districts, lecturing about his grievances and their indifference. At which point the movie's insistence on reducing a complex character to a single, simple-minded dimension becomes too vulgar to bear. Ironically, the people who made Conrack commit the same errors as the educational system their hero rebelled against: they too distrust and patronize the intelligence of those they would instruct.

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