The English teacher (Julianne Moore)

(Amazon UK link)

It’s ten years since we watched the 2013 film ‘The English teacher’. My records told me that I had liked it, on the whole, but neither of us could remember anything about it. So we watched it last night… and neither of us recalled anything from it - it was as if we were watching for the first time. Usually there’s at least a scene or character that triggers memory at some point when we rewatch films.

The opening is nicely done with a narrator telling us about forty-five year old Linda (Julianne Moore), who is an English teacher in a high school in the United States. She’s evidently a good teacher, who has excellent rapport with her students. But she hasn’t had any success with romantic relationships, and her out-of-school life is predictable and dull. 

Then one evening she’s paying for some petrol for her car when she sees a young man approaching her. She assumes the worst and reacts with pepper spray that she carries around… only to discover that she’s attacked a former student, Jason (Michael Angarano). She recalls him as one of her most talented students, who hoped to have a career as a writer. 

She is sorry to hear that he’s had no success with a play he’s written, and that he’s come back to live with his father. He says that his father doesn’t think much of his writing, and wants him to go back to college to study to be a lawyer. Linda is horrified at this idea, and says she would like to read the play herself. 

The play turns out to be passionate, moving and ultimately tragic - and Linda loves it. She suggests to her colleague Carl (Nathan Lane) that perhaps the drama club could present it rather than one of their standard plays, which Carl has been getting rather bored of. It’s not really a play for teenagers and they have some trouble getting it approved.  Jason gets involved in directing - lying to his father (Greg Kinnear) who is a doctor. 

Jason says that the story is essentially his life story, although his main character is a teenage girl. In the play, her mother dies, her father becomes increasingly controlling, and there’s a lot of drinking and swearing as well as an ending which may or may not have to be altered…

There’s a lot of humour in this film, which we thought was well-made with a good pace. Some of the characters are a bit stereotyped - particularly Carl - but that doesn’t matter in a film like this which isn’t meant to be taken too seriously.  There’s an inevitable romantic thread which emerges quite late in the film, and which was cleverly shown in a kind of epilogue. The narrator from the start tries to conclude the story, only to have Linda doing the opposite of what she is supposed to.

It’s not to be taken too seriously, but it successfully fulfils the idea of a rom-com that entertained us for just under and hour and a half. There’s nothing really memorable in it, which is probably why we couldn’t remember anything about it. So perhaps we’ll have forgotten it again in other ten years or so. 

The film is 15-rated, which is probably because there’s a shocking and unexpected scene - not too detailed or gratuitous, but it’s obvious what’s happening - as well as some bad language, and the somewhat disturbing scene involving pepper spray. I doubt if it would be of any interest to anyone under the age of about fifteen anyway.

Review copyright 2026 Sue's DVD Reviews