‘Radical’ Blows Up the Classroom… and Rewrites How to Inspire Us
Vamos! We’ve seen “tear up the rulebook” teacher movies before, but never quite like this.
Here’s a quick movie formula that never seems to fail: Radical Teacher + Unorthodox Methods = Inspired Kids. From poignant Oscar winners like Dead Poets Society to urban takes like Dangerous Minds and broad family-pleasers (School of Rock, anyone?), there’s something about seeing kids’ inner sparks get lit that really gets us in the cinematic feels.
The Radical formula is the same, but it carves a more impactful lane in its true-to-life origins, and the grittier realities of that world. Based on an article published by Wired in 2013, Radical takes us to Matamoros, Mexico — a town plagued by poverty, drug cartel-fuelled violence, and the lowest education ratings in the country.
That’s what real-life sixth-grade teacher Sergio Juarez Correa (Eugenio Derbez) stepped into in 2011, drawn to the job because he heard the struggling school got a grant for new computers. It’s only after arriving that he discovers the computers have all been stolen, their encyclopedias are from 1974, and despite school being free (and mandatory), half of the town’s 6th grade kids have already dropped out.
From the kids who stayed, director Christopher Zalla brings three of them to life for us. There’s Lupe, who at 11 years old is already a surrogate parent — bathing and feeding her younger siblings while her Mum works night shifts. There’s Nico, who’s way less interested in school than in his older cousins’ burgeoning drug-running activities. And maths whiz Paloma, who lives with her father next to a landfill, which they search for items to sell or exchange to scrape by.
In this kind of world, finding “inspiration” is a cliche that’s met with blank stares. These are kids that sometimes pass by bodies lying murdered in the street, shot after a drug deal gone bad. The other staff are in disbelief that Sergio asked to come here (describing the job interview as “He’s got a pulse? He’s hired”). But his rationale is simple: “I just want to try something different.” That turns out to be the understatement of the year.
How does Radical tackle new ideas in teaching?
Sergio makes an immediate splash: the first time the kids meet him, he’s turned all the desks upside down, pretending they’re lifeboats in the ocean and urging them to jump on before they drown (Derbez is truly great here; think “Mexico meets Robin Williams” style energy). The class are dumbstruck, and so is the Principal, Chucho (Daniel Haddad) — what good is a lateral thinking problem about flotation when there’s real lesson plans to follow?
Sergio admits he doesn’t have a “method”, exactly, but it’s clear his approach is student-led learning (also known as student-centred learning, a progressive education theory that goes back decades). He throws out the lesson plan and asks his students what THEY want to learn. Anything at all. And it doesn’t matter if they get things wrong. Dubious, they ask about their grades — how will he mark them? He waves it off: “What do grades matter? You all get a 10. Now we can get back to the important stuff.” (cue children’s cheers!)
That “important stuff” looks like dunking themselves in the school water tank to understand density, or spinning around in the playground to simulate orbits and the solar system. It’s fundamentally different to how learning is “meant to look”, and given the town’s fairly bleak socio-economic DNA, these are some of the film’s most joyful scenes. Chucho’s concerned (the school’s national testing is coming up, and it’s linked to school funding). Can’t Sergio just teach the kids the square roots and historical facts they need to know to pass the test?
Sergio’s aiming higher than that. He rightly points out that the test won’t actually HELP them. “We’re training these kids to be cogs in a machine,” he argues, “So they tune out, drift away, and we lose them.” Rather than just programming them with data, he’s much more invested in unlocking their potential. And it’s working. As we jump between the home & school lives of Lupe, Paloma and Nico, we see their growing interest in escaping what could easily be their automatic futures: as defacto parents, scavengers or even gang members.
Institutional conflict is a running theme. Sergio is bucking a system that’s not just painfully standardised, but openly corrupt: a teacher pressures Sergio into taking a leaked copy of the test, so his students ace the results. And there’s bureaucratic greed on the education board, who suspend Sergio after a philosophical class discussion about safe sex and abortion. You won’t need to ponder long over the timing: the suspension comes just when Sergio discovers the school computers weren’t stolen after all. Funding was granted — but they never arrived.
What does Radical have to say about poverty, and potential?
Here’s why it was so important for director Christopher Zalla to focus on three of Sergio’s students and humanise them for us. By getting to know Lupe, Nico and Paloma, we identify with each of their strengths, and feel angrier about a system that’s letting their potential drain away. Not just in a bureaucratic sense (like the embezzled school computer funds, or suspending a teacher that’s actually inspired them), but on a socio-economic level too.
For example, Lupe does everything a mother would do, while her own mother sleeps days and works nights. It’s telling that when Lupe sees her mother’s positive pregnancy test, she sighs. Even knowing what that means at her age says a lot, but for Lupe the implications of a new baby are far tougher. Sergio has inspired her to look deeper into philosophy, and she dreams of being a professor — but she crashes back to earth when her Mum tells her (like it’s obvious) that she won’t be at school next year. “Who’ll look after your baby brother while I’m at work?”
When we met Nico, he is like a young Henry Hill in Goodfellas — being lured into the criminal world by older boys with enticing stacks of cash and silver pistols. But he resists it, making the most progress in Sergio’s class. He says he’s dumb, but the floatation exercise inspired him to repair an old boat. Who knows, maybe he’s a future engineer? When Sergio realises Nico has drugs in his school bag, he turns the question back to him — if I report this, your potential future vanishes. Do you want to make a different choice? Which way do you want your life to go?
But Paloma might be the heartbeat of the film; a genuine one in a million student. Sergio can’t fathom the thought of her fossicking through a garbage dump for anything of value. In one scene, she helps her Dad at the scrap metal yard, quickly calculating the owner’s underpaying him by fudging the sums. It’s a nod to how the undereducated can be taken advantage of, and how they don’t always have the means to lift their way out of that repression. A real world look at the kind of vicious circle that Sergio wants to keep his students from slipping into.
It’s these kinds of injustices that fuel Radical. It isn’t that these kids are resigned to unfulfilling lives because of their OWN lack of initiative. It’s that their futures are stripped from them — or chosen for them — by adults before they’ve even begun. Whether it’s undereducated / shift working single parents, a brutal drug syndicate, or the governmental failures that lead to both, these kids are planted in poor soil. As Sergio angrily asks about Paloma’s wasted talent, “How many kids in this country could be like her?! As long as we carry on like this, we’ll never know.”
How does Radical explore realism vs. idealism?
This is a fascinating mix, and Radical manages to keep a cool head with the gooey stuff. It’s not a Disney fairytale — and that’s reflected when a violent and tragic event affects three of Sergio’s students. He’s shattered, and questions the moral impact of his “no method” teaching style: “Maybe I’ve done more harm than good.” In Matamoros, a “shoot for the stars” mentality doesn’t protect you against the danger of being shot for real.
Zalla explores this “realism vs. idealism” theme through Paloma’s dream of aeronautics: she constructs her own telescope out of traded parts, using it to look across the Gulf of Mexico to the Texan launch site of Space X. Sergio encourages her to apply for a student aerospace scholarship, but gets pushback from her father, who doesn’t want his daughter’s head “filled with ideas… what happens after she comes back to reality?” In this world, parents want to protect their kids from hope, because it only makes the real world more painful.
That’s at the crux of one of Radical’s saddest scenes, where Paloma opens up to Sergio after she too is forced to drop out of school to care for family. It’s hugely bittersweet to hear her tell her teacher, “I wouldn’t have belief if it wasn’t for you. But sometimes believing isn’t enough. Sometimes the reality is the reality. People like me don’t get to escape it.”
So what’s the takeaway from Radical?
Despite its heavy themes, with Radical Zalla has crafted a crowd-pleaser that knows when to balance some potentially sugary movie-magic with the realities of an impoverished Mexican society. The Hollywood version might see the corrupt education board clapped in cuffs and Nico sailing off into the sunset with Paloma by his side, but we’re spared that fantasy here.
Instead, Radical stays grounded with an emotional finale (not every character has a happy ending), but leaves us uplifted with on-screen stats that Sergio’s real-life students achieved — like Paloma, who achieved the highest maths scores in literally all of Mexico. It’s proof in black and white that someone who’s driven to tap into kids’ potential and guide them to the best possible future can actually make a difference — not just to their grades, but to their minds.
That may be shown best when Lupe (in one of the film’s three very strong child performances) circles back in the film’s final act and gives her answer to Sergio’s very first moral thought exercise, about saving the passengers of a sinking boat. “I realised it’s simple,” she says: “ You shouldn’t sell more tickets than there are spaces on the lifeboats.” [MIC DROP] Take that, Fortune 500 CEOs! Pretty philosophical thinking… especially for a school kid with “no future”.
Originally published at https://good.film.
