Another Round has been getting some press in the last few weeks (I’m writing now in March, so that phrase is somewhat dated) as one of the best films of the year–in a year that has been very strange for movies. It touches on two soft spots for its intended audience, 40 year old men who are fast approaching their midlife crisis, while providing some novel solutions the potential balm of secret day-drinking and the comfort of having adventurous, open-minded, supportive friends.
There is little to say about this movie except that character studies provide a much-desired reprieve from plot heavy mass-market (would-have-been) blockbusters. The much-discussed dance scene is exquisite. This checks a box for me as a genuine high school movie (one of my favorite genres), even if almost everything that happens seems extremely wrong.
One of the reasons why I liked this movie enough to set it aside for the dark days of winter was when I discovered it is a crypto-high school movie. All four of the men are high school teachers or coaches at a prep academy, which puts it squarely in my must-watch list. It was nice to see some of the similarities with other foreign depictions of private secondary education, as in Philophobia, one of the Cinequest Selections from this past fall. Both of these movies share some overlap in terms of the Teachers Behaving Badly Venn Diagram, though Philophobia comes at it from the student side of the spectrum, which somehow feels a little skeevier.
Another Round is the rare high school movie almost entirely about adults. Even Blockers needed to occasionally cut to high school students at their prom in order to entice the audience. If someone had mentioned that the movie was mostly John Cena struggling with feelings of being supportive and protective, I cannot imagine the trailer would’ve been as straightforward. Hats off to Mads Mikkelsen for his performance as a burnt out husk of a teacher in a year when a lot of us are probably feeling that way.
