Radical

 

Especially for educators, Radical will resonate loud and long after the credits roll.

Set in a desperately poor Mexican town across the border from Brownsville, Texas, Radical is Christopher Zalla's heartwarming account of a zealous 6th-grade teacher (an amazing Eugenio Derbez of CODA) who comes to a distressed, under-resourced and under-inspired school where the students rarely graduate, lost to the harsh realities of criminality and poverty. Those students followed most closely in the picture are delightfully authentic; we care deeply about them and their families, their fates.

Derbez's Sergio Juarez is imbued with spirited confidence in the rightness of his unorthodox approach to teaching, his faith in the children's potential, so much so that he makes a convert of the battle-worn school director, played by Daniel Haddad, and their friendship is one of the movie's bonuses.

But as is the case with most of these inspirational true tales, events involving governmental corruption and parental shortsightedness threaten to derail Sergio's good work and douse the fire he has lit in his young charges.

Yes, the story is a bit familiar, but its heart is enormous and its optimism so welcome in these cynical days.