Educating Rita

Based on the play written in 1979 by Willy Russell, the movie Educating Rita was produced in 1983 and is set in Liverpool. It stars Julia Walters as Rita and Michael Caine as Frank Bryant, her tutor. Its central themes of class, gender, and privilege are timeless, and as a result, it has aged well.

Rita is a 26 yr old hairdresser from a working-class family, married to a working-class man. She is aware that something is missing in her life. She wants ‘choice’, and realises that as an uneducated hairdresser whose destiny is to have children—and soon, as her husband and father keep reminding her—she doesn’t have much choice at all. She decides to attend ‘Open University’ to study literature. Enter her tutor, Dr Frank Bryant. Frank is a failed poet, who, since his wife left him many years ago, has replaced writing with drinking. He is full of cynicism for life, his students, and for university learning.

Rita and Frank hit it off and both of them are enriched for it. Frank admires Rita’s warmth and grounded outlook. Rita looks up to Frank and can see brilliance beneath his weary and cynical ways.

Rita’s controlling husband has never liked her studying. He’s keen to have children, but Rita is secretly taking the pill because she’s not ready. Unable to identify with either her working-class background or with the educated elite, she feels that she’s a ‘half-caste’. Her sense of entrapment is captured in the poignant scene in the pub where she sees her possible future in her mother’s tears, as everyone around them sings happily, but obliviously. Rita decides she wants to ‘sing a better song’ and leaves her husband. She chooses a difficult path for a woman in the early 1980s and turns her back on not only her husband, but her father as well, who also thinks she should stop studying and have a baby.

Her rationale for choosing this path is the unfailing desire to find out ‘about me’. She likes what she finds and sticks with it. Her eagerness to learn initially outweighs her ability, but soon she is talking and talk and writing essays with the best of them. As the quality of her work improves, Frank’s admiration for what he initially saw in her turns to fear and despair as he witnesses Rita become more like him and all the other faceless academics around him. Gone is her naivety and in its place is her ability to adopt the correct jargon, socialise with other students and write essays that will satisfy examiners.

In short, she gains the knowledge that he has. She is able to enter a world that he takes for granted. Frank does not realise that it is his position of privilege that allows him to be cynical. It is precisely because he is educated that he can see ‘culture’ for what it is. Rita, on the other hand, does not have that privilege. Importantly, once she gains that privilege, she will not necessarily take Frank’s position on it. She will not necessarily become cynical like him, or like her flamboyant and ‘classy’, but deeply depressed flatmate Trish.

As a sometimes disillusioned academic, I found this film easy to relate to, very entertaining and extremely thought-provoking. For a simply made film, it has layers and layers of meaning to it that give it great depth.