Review | My Old School: A documentary with Alan Cumming subverts the genre with a surreal story

Film screened at the Sundance Film Festival 2022

In 1993, Brandon Lee starred in one of the UK’s most colorful royal stories. A bright and shrewd high school student at a prestigious school in Scotland, he stood out among his classmates, dreamed of studying medicine and despite his quirks struck up a series of friendships – harboring students who until then had been constantly victimized by ‘intimidation. His impressive story, full of surprising and almost cinematic facts, was nothing more than a prank created by an adult who wanted to relive his school years in order to correct his clumsy adolescence. But nearly 30 years after all that, Jono McLeod returns to the halls of his old school, Bearsden Academy, for a cathartic experience that might be uninviting if it wasn’t told so well.

In a great combination of documentary factor and drama, My Old School is an unexpected and sensitive journey that, even in the face of such a problematic narrative, manages to be sweet and sprinkled with a touch of humor. With a spectacular and very well-constructed narrative, the production invites the audience to a peculiar school reunion, in which former classmates help piece together Lee’s prank from their own experiences with him. And without hard feelings and with real impartiality, McLeod turns his documentary into a box of memories, providing a different experience for audiences by fusing different genres and formats.

With the help of animation, the strange story of Brandon Lee becomes a playful and picturesque journey in space-time, which does honor to documentary lovers, because it offers an adventure to lovers of fiction, which naturally does not would not be attracted by the documentary aspect of the story. And in this mix, Alan Cumming becomes a wonderful surprise. Dubbing the audio interview with Lee (whose real name is another), the star delivers the right expressiveness, proving once again that he is able to navigate through the most diverse narrative formats, always with authenticity and insight.

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Bringing a bittersweet flavor to the audience, My Old School takes us to the most disparate and contradictory emotions. While we see a narcissist unable to discover his true professional calling, we also see a fragile man who longs to fulfill an unspoken promise made to his father on his deathbed. At the same time, the strangeness of their methods intrigues us, confuses us and causes us mixed feelings. But Jono McLeod’s well-tuned storytelling and dynamic, interactive directing do their part by delivering a delicate ending, one that doesn’t judge his character analyzed here, but seeks to understand him beyond his lies and problematic decisions. And will fake Brandon Lee ever realize his dream of becoming a doctor? We do not know. What we do know is that – definitely – some real-life stories are far stranger than any fiction.

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