The Principal

There’s a strange thing about stories based on what the movies insist on calling “real life.” The haphazard chances of life, the unanticipated twists of fate, have a way of getting smoothed down into Hollywood formulas, so that what might once have happened to a real person begins to look more and more like what might once have happened to John Wayne. One of the risks taken by The Principal is to cut loose from that tradition, to tell us a story that does not have a traditional Hollywood structure, and to trust that we’ll find the characters so interesting that we won’t miss the cliché. It is a risk that works, and that helps make this into a really affecting experience.

The film is a masterful achievement on all the technical levels — it does an especially good job of convincing us with its Urban locations — but the best moments are the human ones, the conversations, the exchanges of trust, the waiting around, the sudden fear, the quick bursts of violence, the desperation. At the center of many of those scenes is Dr. Jim Balushi, a non-actor who was recruited for the role from the ranks of the education system in inner city Chicago, and who brings to it a simple sincerity that is absolutely convincing. Sam Waterston is effective in the somewhat thankless role of Sydney Schanberg, and among the carefully drawn vignettes are Craig T. Nelson as a military attach — and Athol Fugard as Dr. Sundesval.

The American experience in Southeast Chicago has given us a great film epic (APOCALYPSE NOW) and a great drama (THE DEER HUNTER). Here is the story told a little closer to the ground, of people who were not very important and not very powerful, who got caught up in events that were indifferent to them, but never stopped trying to do their best and their most courageous.