A teacher review – an emotional portrayal of the age old student-teacher love affair
Cinema and television have a range of toxic obsessions, but none more so than the illicit teacher-student love affair. The allure may lie in the challenge of portraying the taboo; creating something entertaining and intriguing on screen that is unequivocally abhorred in reality.
A Teacher is Jason Bateman’s production company, Aggregate Films’, latest attempt at the dynamic. Picked up by The BBC and available on iPlayer now, the miniseries follows 30-something teacher Claire (Kate Mara) and her relationship with her eighteen-year-old student Eric (Nick Robinson), in a small Texan town.
The relationship follows a well-rehearsed pattern; Eric needs better grades to receive a scholarship, Claire offers him extra tutoring and they secretly begin to build a fantasy where the lines of student and teacher become blurred by passion. Only, fantasy soon becomes reality when they find themselves in the backseat of her car in an empty parking lot. And the repercussions will haunt them both for the rest of their lives.
This is no endorsement of cradle-snatching. The programme is careful not to become too steamy or romanticised, their chemistry is barely palpable and completely overridden by the desperation in each of the characters. Eric is a teenager looking for a way to define masculinity without the guidelines of a father to follow, in Claire he finds a route out of his small town and a marker to establish himself as a man. In Eric, Claire seeks the youth that was stolen from her by caring for her alcoholic father. They are both looking for love and attention too, from people who are too busy or disinterested to provide it: Eric from his mother raising two younger siblings and Claire from her husband.
In the beginning, the narrative feels shared by Eric and Claire, but by the later episodes it becomes clear that both the audience and Eric have fallen privy to Claire’s manipulation of the situation. Regardless of her feelings or damaged childhood, Eric is a barely-legal teenager and his perceptions of sex and relationships will be forever twisted by the experience.
The relationship between the couple is tricky to watch. There are moments where the reality of their roles as teacher and student lapse and you feel disturbed by momentarily rooting for their relationship. But the show’s real merit comes from the portrayal of the aftermath. Initially, it seems that Eric’s life splinters whilst Claire’s shatters; he sets off for University and the rest of his life, whilst her marriage and career crumbles. But Robinson plays Eric’s slowly breaking spirit with incredible subtlety, and by the end of the series, your heart aches for the teenage trauma as he grapples with the intertwined feelings of first love and being taken advantage of.
The show carefully navigates the nuance of a relationship between an older woman and younger man too: at one point Claire tells her brother, “if the roles were reversed you’d be high fiving me right now.” Yet, despite the respect the relationship earns Eric from his peers (he is accelerated through a fraternity house when he joins university after they hear about it), it becomes all-consuming for them both. When Eric meets someone else at a party she admits she approached him because he was legendary at her school, and when Claire goes on a Tinder date it transpires he has googled her and is attracted to the notion that she has slept with a student.
The programme doesn’t set out to romanticise or condemn the student-teacher dynamic, but tell the tale of two damaged individuals through their twisted relationship with one another. It is a slow burner with some cringingly American moments that seem out of place on iPlayer (and a very on-the-nose soundtrack – the lyrics “if I were your boyfriend” by Justin Bieber play on one of the early episode credits), but Robinson and Mara are excellent. The portrayal of fragile teenage masculinity is something rarely done well on screen, but in which Robinson more than excels, for that reason alone it is worth a watch.