{"id":2583,"date":"2014-09-08T17:55:37","date_gmt":"2014-09-08T17:55:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2014\/09\/08\/toronto-film-review-the-riot-club\/"},"modified":"2014-09-08T17:55:37","modified_gmt":"2014-09-08T17:55:37","slug":"toronto-film-review-the-riot-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2014\/09\/08\/toronto-film-review-the-riot-club\/","title":{"rendered":"Toronto Film Review: \u2018The Riot Club\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Debruge \/ Variety<\/p>\n

‘An Education’ director Lone Scherfig offers another tough life lesson, this one exposing the gross misconduct within an Oxford private dining society.<\/h3>\n

At Oxford, there are classes you take and classes you are born into, and\u00a0Lone Scherfig<\/a>\u2019s \u201cThe Riot Club<\/a>,\u201d adapted from Laura Wade\u2019s play \u201cPosh,\u201d is concerned only with the latter \u2014 specifically, a group of 10 elite students who went to England\u2019s top schools, descend from the richest families and carry the country\u2019s best blood. It\u2019s enough to make anyone else\u2019s blood boil, which is the deliciously masochistic pleasure auds can expect from watching these pretty, privileged young men \u2014 the entitled British cousins of what Tom Wolfe called \u201cMasters of the Universe\u201d \u2014 band together and misbehave.<\/p>\n

Like her 2009 feature, \u201cAn Education,\u201d Scherfig\u2019s latest deals with lessons that can\u2019t be learned in classrooms, but only by narrowly surviving certain life mistakes. Here, it\u2019s two first-year male students, rather than a naive young woman, being seduced and corrupted by a system their grandparents assembled. Much is made about legacy, lineage and the carrying on of certain traditions, though the parental pressure never seems a burden here, the way it is in \u201cDead Poets Society\u201d and other American pics, where more is made of personal independence.<\/p>\n

In the rarefied bubble of British private societies, all men are not created equal. Some \u2014 like Alistair (Sam Claflin<\/a>, \u201cThe Hunger Games: Catching Fire\u201d), kid brother of a former Riot Club president \u2014 are born inherently better than others. Others, unfairly privileged with charisma and looks, \u201chave it in them to be a fuckin\u2019 legend.\u201d The latter describes the more middle-class Miles (\u201cThe Host\u2019s\u201d Max Irons), who attracts the attention of the Riot Club\u2019s resident gay member, earning a nomination to join the ultra-exclusive group that way.<\/p>\n

Like a poncier version of American fraternities, the group hazes its invitation-only pledges, making for a rowdy first stretch. The pic trades in both the fantasy and nightmarish aspects of university social worlds where exclusivity is the draw \u2014\u00a0as seen in everything from \u201cThe Skulls\u201d to \u201cThe Social Network,\u201d and shot here in a similar elegant style of cool blues, velvet coats and wood paneling. We naturally crave entree into enclaves\u00a0we can\u2019t necessarily access ourselves, just as it\u2019s only normal to want to see the egos at the top brought to their knees, and Scherfig\u00a0offers both to audiences craving scandal as well as smarts (meaning, it could potentially\u00a0play\u00a0to teens and arthouse crowds).<\/p>\n

In Wade\u2019s script, the fictional Riot Club was named for its founding hedonist, seen in saucy flashback, rather than the group\u2019s general spirit of misbehavior, although the line between the two is razor-thin. After Lord Riot was murdered for seducing a professor\u2019s wife, his peers established a private dining society\u00a0in his honor, planning an annual meal in which the tradition was to indulge as extravagantly as possible before tearing apart the unlucky establishment they\u2019d hired out for the purpose,\u00a0fully planning to pay for the damages when they were done.<\/p>\n

During the\u00a0initiation segment of the film, Scherfig relies\u00a0on Miles as her\u00a0relatable audience proxy \u2014 less entitled\u00a0and\u00a0a bit more mature than his spoiled cohorts \u2014 though by the end, most people would be happy to see the whole group disbanded. Having gotten some of his oats-sowing out of the way already, Miles is\u00a0evidently ready to handle a more respectable relationship with \u201cbootstrappy\u201d g.f. Lauren (Holliday Grainger). The other members find\u00a0nothing odd about sharing an escort between them (though the escort has other plans, resulting in one of the rare scenes where a character manages to avoid the humiliation the group has planned for her).<\/p>\n

\u201cHasn\u2019t anyone noticed how massively homoerotic this is?\u201d asks Lauren, observing how one of the school\u2019s sports teams behaves in a local bar, though she might as well be speaking about the entire U.K. educational system, where \u2014\u00a0if the film can be taken as any sort of indication \u2014\u00a0boarding-school boys can hardly keep their testosterone to themselves. That attitude sparks genuine concern\u00a0for any of the female characters, whom these lads\u00a0routinely\u00a0objectify, viewing them as just another commodity. The same goes for\u00a0their freedom when things go seriously over the line. A\u00a0well-placed Riot Club alum (Tom Hollander) affectionately\u00a0refers to\u00a0such incidents as \u201cscrapes,\u201d regaling the boys with stories from his day, which are nothing compared with the trouble in store here \u2014 effective, though\u00a0clearly rigged\u00a0to prove the movie\u2019s pre-existing view of such orgs.<\/p>\n

Brits might object to such an enraging portrayal, which veers between salacious and cynical, though Scherfig\u2019s unique perspective is\u00a0just\u00a0one more\u00a0reason\u00a0she\u00a0was\u00a0such a smart choice to handle this material. Owing to both her Danish background and her gender, Scherfig\u00a0approaches the milieu with shrewd anthropological wit, amplifying Wade\u2019s research with her own keen outsider insights \u2014 this on top of an expert grasp of tension and tone as the club\u2019s initial allure turns to anxiety and disgust. So these model-beautiful monsters think they\u2019re better than everyone else? Let\u2019s see how they like having their class dismissed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Debruge \/ Variety ‘An Education’ director Lone Scherfig offers another tough life lesson, this one exposing the gross misconduct within an Oxford private dining society. At Oxford, there are classes you take and classes you are born into, and\u00a0Lone Scherfig\u2019s \u201cThe Riot Club,\u201d adapted from Laura Wade\u2019s play \u201cPosh,\u201d is concerned only with the … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nToronto Film Review: \u2018The Riot Club\u2019 - Thunderbird Entertainment<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2014\/09\/08\/toronto-film-review-the-riot-club\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Toronto Film Review: \u2018The Riot Club\u2019 - Thunderbird Entertainment\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Peter Debruge \/ Variety ‘An Education’ director Lone Scherfig offers another tough life lesson, this one exposing the gross misconduct within an Oxford private dining society. 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