USA TODAY International Edition
Jackman, Janney learn lessons in ‘ Education’
Obsession with college admissions didn’t start with Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin and other affluent parents caught up in last year’s bribery scandal. ❚ It was alive and well in 2002, as seen in “Bad Education,” an HBO film due Saturday ( 8 EDT/ PDT). It’s based on a true story about well- regarded administrators who loot a Long Island, New York, school system as parents and school board members, swooning over acceptance rates at elite universities, live in blissful ignorance and even become complicit.
Although an all- consuming pursuit of college admissions is milieu, not motivation, for the embezzling by Roslyn school superintendent Frank Tassone ( Hugh Jackman, “The Greatest Showman”) and business manager Pam Gluckin ( Allison Janney, “Mom”) in the darkly comic movie, Jackman sees both the 2002 and 2019 events as cautionary tales.
“We were filming when ( the college bribery scandal) came out. It’s not dissimilar. These are quite extreme examples of people compromising their morals and themselves,” he says. “Humans have a worrying tendency to pretend things are OK because it suits them: ‘ I’ll turn a blind eye to that, because it helps my family,’ that kind of feeling.”
In the movie, the success of Roslyn’s schools, which raises parents’ self- esteem and community property values, leads to scarce oversight of its finances. The school board president ( Ray Romano) is oblivious. Only an intrepid high school journalist ( Geraldine Viswanathan) spots the chicanery.
“It shows you how desperate people can get ( for) their kids to have the best. And usually it’s a sign of people seeing their kids as extensions of themselves and who they want to be and having that reflected back on them, that their kid got into Harvard,” Janney says. “It’s very much parallel to ( the bribery scandal) and what’s probably been going on for a long time, the ends- justify- themeans kind of thing.”
Frank and Pam were scamming separately, but they were friends whose alliance seems conspiratorial at times. Both actors, who knew each other but had not acted together before, found an immediate rapport.
An amusing conversation in the bleachers, in which Pam taunts carbavoiding Frank with her sandwich, “was the first scene we shot, and we were adlibbing, improvising, making each other laugh,” Jackman says. “It was just fantastic.”
Even with a real- life story so rich with human frailty, the idea of playing school administrators might have seemed tame for Jackman, known for playing XMen’s Wolverine, and Janney, who won an Oscar portraying Tonya Harding’s mesmerizing mother in “I, Tonya.”
But both were enthralled by layered characters hiding huge secrets, although Janney says she wasn’t excited when the concept first came up.
“My agent said it was about these school administrators and I was like, ‘ Well, that sounds like it’s not going to be very interesting,’” she says. But she found the script, by Roslyn High alum Mike Makowsky and based on a New
York Magazine article by Robert Kolker, “It was incredibly suspenseful and jawdropping, these two characters and what they did. And it always fascinates me to play someone who looks like one thing on the surface but is altogether different underneath.”
As with LaVona Golden, the abusive mother in “I, Tonya,” Janney says she avoids judging Pam, while trying to figure out what motivated “a hard- working, respected, very well- liked woman” to become a thief.
“It’s interesting to put together the psychology behind embezzlement,” she says. “I imagine she probably had some financial squeeze that would have caused some sort of shame, that in a desperate situation she borrowed and realized no one noticed. Maybe she thought she was going to pay it back. Then, slowly, she started taking advantage of the situation, until she was just blinded by it and probably talked herself into feeling she was entitled.”
Tassone, a dapper, exquisitely coiffed man who was obsessed with appearances, lived an even more shrouded existence.
“As an actor, I put on and take off masks of various kinds, pretending to be others,” Jackman says. “And here was someone who had many masks, some of which I don’t think he realized he was putting on.”
He sees a tragic element to Tassone. “He was the best superintendent probably in the country, I think the highest paid at the time. He dedicated his life to public service, to education ( and had a) doctorate from Columbia. How on Earth does someone like that slip so far to being part of a $ 12 million embezzlement scheme? That’s fascinating to me.”
Their appreciation went beyond the characters. Jackman praised the multilayered tone set by director Cory Finley (“Thoroughbreds”). “It’s sort of black comedy and a thriller and very suspenseful and then it’s sort of shocking. ( Finley) really has the ability to keep audiences on their toes.”
As an additional treat, viewers can take in the thick Long Island accents sported by the Australian Jackman and Janney, who grew up in Ohio.
Janney inadvertently started practicing years ago.
“I spent a lot of summers in Long Island as a girl growing up“she says. “I fell in love with the accent back then and would come home back to Ohio and saying, ‘ Oh, I think that’s very interesting.’ I just thought the way they said ‘ very’ was the coolest thing on the planet. I thought that was so classy.”
“It’s sort of black comedy and a thriller and very suspenseful and then it’s sort of shocking.”
Hugh Jackman on “Bad Education”