The Kindergarten Teacher has a race problem

This film's main character exploits a child of color — and no one talks about it

Maggie Gyllenhaal and Parker Sevak.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Netflix)

The lonely and restless wife is a common trope in film. We've seen it in Unfaithful, Revolutionary Road, and Notes on a Scandal, to name a few examples. But while these characters are often bored, their stories are almost never boring. She usually spends her idle time participating in activities that straddle the line between unbridled fun and criminal activity. In The Kindergarten Teacher, it is most certainly the latter. In this film, however, the protagonist's worst crime is the exploitation of a child of color. And yet, this travesty goes entirely unmentioned in the film; it is but a tool for advancing the plot, a stepping stone on the path to the white protagonist's redemption. As a black woman, this was the first thing I saw — and the last thing I remembered — about the film, and it irked me.

The Kindergarten Teacher, which was adapted from the original Israeli movie of the same name, begins with a familiar story: Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a married mother of two rebellious teenage children who disregard her every word. Her husband, Grant (Michael Chernus), is a loving father and companion who, like Lisa, has resolved himself to the monotony of daily life. When Lisa tells him she's started taking a poetry class to fill her idle time, he merely flashes an empty smile. The trouble is that she's not a very good poet — even her instructor tells her so. But Jimmy (Parker Sevak), a 5-year-old student of Indian descent in her kindergarten class, is. Lisa decides to write down some of the child's unrefined prose and present it as her own. Her teacher loves it. What begins as genuine admiration of her young student's talent quickly turns into a reckless hijacking of it.

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Candice Frederick

Candice Frederick is a freelance TV/film critic living in New York City. You can find more of her work here.