Written and directed by Christopher Zalla, the film is set in 2011 in the town of Matamoros, where vicious gangs have left a trail of blood around every corner. In this volatile environment, students at the José Urbina López Primary School wear crisp uniforms and diligently stand in single file, obeying their teachers’ pleas for silence, even though the sound of gunfire might erupt at any moment.
Among the kids trying to get by in this rough world is Paloma (Jennifer Trejo), a smart but shy girl whom we meet scavenging in the town dump near where she lives with her father. When Paloma finds a mirror, she seems to ask, “Who am I?” Nico (Danilo Guardiola Escobar), on the other hand, is the class clown, but that’s not the problem: He’s already started running contraband for the local cartel, and once you’re in, it’s hard to get out.
There are other problems: Test scores are habitually low, and over half the school’s students drop out by the sixth grade. Principal Chucho (Daniel Haddad) is consistently short-staffed, and when one teacher goes on maternity leave, he hires Sergio (Eugenio Derbez of the Oscar-winning film “CODA”), who’s appalled by conditions at the school. Sergio was drawn to apply to the school because he heard it had won a grant for its computer lab; the funds, however, have disappeared.
Sergio is frustrated by the corruption of the system, but his boss doesn’t offer any solution. “Don’t kick the hornet’s nest,” Chucho tells his new hire — who of course does exactly that. Will this quirky teacher change his students’ lives for the better?
Derbez’s portrayal of Sergio, though based on a real person, Sergio Juárez Correa, is derived from a long line of similarly inspirational movie educators, from Sidney Poitier’s Mark Thackeray in “To Sir, With Love” to Robin Williams’s John Keating in “Dead Poets Society.” Sergio’s methods are similarly unconventional. He dispenses with lesson plans, and when his students first encounter him, he’s rearranged their desks into a jumble, trying to get students engaged in problem-solving: Imagine the desks are lifeboats, he tells them. There are 23 students, but only six desks. Who among you will survive? And what makes boats float, anyway?
As the title promises, Sergio does something unorthodox. Instead of teaching by means of rote repetition, he lets students tell him what they want to learn, at their own pace. And while his methods take a minute to work, when they finally click, a whole new future appears possible.
Like Sergio’s unusual modus operandi, “Radical” takes some time to click, its first half as unstructured as Sergio’s classroom. But at about the halfway point, when the kids discover the excitement of learning, it becomes as thrilling as any blockbuster.
Needless to say, Sergio will run into obstacles, and his story arc is predictable and a bit manipulative. But it’s still affecting. Although the character of Paloma is based on an actual child prodigy, other student characters are composites, so the dynamic between her and Nico feels like a screenwriter’s construct. Even though we can see how the pieces come together, it’s hard not to get caught up in the spirit of excitement.
“Radical,” ironically, is hardly radical filmmaking. But like teaching, if it reaches just one struggling student or one burned-out teacher, the film argues, it could well change the world.
PG-13. At area theaters. Contains some strong violence, mature thematic material and coarse language. In Spanish with subtitles. 125 minutes.