"My Old School" -- Movie Review

 

This week at Lincoln Center, I attended an advance screening of the new documentary, “My Old School”, starring Alan Cumming. 

Synopsis

When a mysterious young man suddenly shows up at a high school, he excels in all of his classes – but is he really who he claims to be?

Story

In the mid-1990’s, the Bearsden Academy, a secondary school near Glasgow, Scotland, accepted one of its more unusual students – a young man named Brandon Lee, a strange looking individual who appears to be a bit older than most of his classmates.  Regardless, Brandon made quite an impression on his fellow students and teachers alike.  Other students were a little suspicious of him because he had the same name as Bruce Lee’s son – an actor who had recently died as a result of an accident on the set of a movie he was shooting.  But once this Brandon Lee convinced everyone that he was no relation, he was accepted by everyone else.

Brandon had quite a story.  He was Canadian and his mother was an opera singer; as such, she home-schooled him as he accompanied her whenever she toured.  His father was dean at a university in London; since he never saw him much, he was closer to his mother.  Tragically, Brandon’s mother died in an automobile accident, in which he was seriously injured.  With his grandmother living on the outskirts of Glasgow, it was decided that he would live with her and attend Bearsden.  Before long, his father passed away also, so his grandmother was all the family he had left in the world. 

Despite the sad background, Brandon had good fortune at school.  In addition to getting good grades and awing his teachers, he soon became somewhat popular with the student body.  Most of his friends were those who were ignored by others – a young man of African descent who hung out at Brandon’s place after school and others who might be considered social outcasts.  All of this would suddenly come to an end when he made the decision to join some young women on vacation one semester; when he got into trouble, his friends quickly found out about the dark secret that Brandon had been keeping all the while.  When the truth came out, will he be able to stay in school?

Review

“My Old School” is definitely one oddball movie – but one that is nonetheless quite fascinating; it’s a story too good to be true, made all the more intriguing by the fact that it actually did happen.   Although characterized as either a documentary or documentary-drama, it might very well fall into a hybrid genre of “quasi-documentary”.  Regardless of what you call it, there’s an excellent chance that you’ll be hanging on through every moment.  So why is Alan Cumming in this film?  Good question – basically, although this is a story about Brandon Lee, the man who went by that name was reluctant to actually appear in the motion picture – instead, Cumming lip-synchs to his audio recordings.     

What raises the weirdness level of this documentary – not that it was all that necessary – is that the filmmaker uses a combination of animation, interviews (with former classmates) and television news footage, as well as clips from some home movies; this last bit mostly came from Brandon’s appearance in a school production of the musical “South Pacific”.  The inclusion of the animation is somewhat off-putting because you’re not quite sure if you’re supposed to be taking all of this seriously; it adds a somewhat comic element to the story which can at times feel ill-placed.  This can make the viewer wonder whether it’s a fictional story. 

In an interview with director and former classmate Jono McLeod (which can be streamed here), he claims that he was forced to use the animation because the pandemic hit when he was shooting the movie; initially, he was inspired by watching “Wandavision” and decided he wanted it to look like MTV’s old show “Daria”.  The animation was done from storyboards the director had originally made.  When he approached Cumming about this unusual role, the actor immediately accepted because he loved the challenge of embodying a real person whom he’d never met.  Cumming was only needed to shoot for about a day and a half for his limited contribution.