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Each of the 10 compact episodes of “A Teacher” begins with a startling trigger warning: The series contains “grooming depictions” that can be disturbing. However, you have to look quickly to see them. Before the first episode ends, Claire Wilson (Kate Mara), a young English teacher at a high school in Texas, lies to her husband about his SAT tutoring sessions at a local restaurant with 18-year-old student Eric. Walker. (Nick Robinson). It won’t be long before the tutor moves into the back seat of his car.
“A Teacher,” which was created and primarily directed by Hannah Fidell, has a calm but steady momentum. (It opens with three episodes Tuesday on FX on Hulu.) It tells the story of Claire and Eric from the first meeting to the final recrimination, after the prices were paid and lives were hopelessly distorted, in less than half past four – tidy for a streaming miniseries. The 21-29 minute episodes scroll, and if you watch the latest ones as they come out, a week apart they might feel a little superfluous, like cold fries.
This saving is a noticeable thing with “One Teacher”. More noticeable is how rarely it sounds like an uplifting tale, despite on-screen warnings and references to resources about sexual assault and the story’s occasional explicit references to Claire as a predator. Most of the time, it plays out like a tragic love story in the emo-prairie style, and it has the look and beats of a tasteful independent film. Which makes sense since Fidell, the daughter of former New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse, expanded it from her 2013 film of the same title.
Not making Claire an obvious monster might be a brave choice after # MeToo, but Fidell hasn’t done anything else that’s particularly interesting or revealing. There are familiar dots to connect – an alcoholic dad (MC Gainey), a cowardly husband (Ashley Zukerman) spending his savings on musical equipment – but Claire’s infatuation with Eric just seems to materialize, a product of chemistry. bodily. Mara, who projects sanity and a biting intelligence, makes Claire’s bad choices believable as they happen, and maybe the idea is that they could happen to anyone. But it’s not a very dramatic idea.
Robinson, who starred in “Love, Simon” (and who, at 25, doesn’t look much younger onscreen than Mara, 37), has a harder time making sense of Eric , who is positioned as sensitive and fragile but appears as a supernatural adult, in a way that doesn’t quite add up. But if the goal was to distract attention from predatory exploitation and conventional melodrama, mission accomplished.
The meaning of the mixed messages continues until the story’s abrupt conclusion, a sudden wave on Eric’s part that could be interpreted as a challenge to the audience – here you all became involved in Claire’s romantic fantasies. and Eric when you should have seen something else. entirely. If that’s what it is, that’s a pretty lazy thing.
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