"Another Round"

A Movie Review & Other Back to School Recommendations

Allow me to make a movie recommendation for teachers, especially those going through a vocational or life crisis: the Danish film, Another Round.

The premise of the film is ridiculous on its face: four high school teachers, all men, and each immersed in some kind of burn-out (vocational, personal, professional, or in some cases all three at once) agree to drink enough to maintain a blood alcohol level of .05, and during their working school days.

The movie shows up on the internet searches as a “comedy,” but the movie, at least for me, anyway, didn’t land a lot of laughs. Rather, I was struck by the ways this strange teacherly pact put the men in closer touch to the parts of their lives that were sick or neglected: a husband who has accustomed himself to being absent physically and emotionally from his wife; a music teacher who invests and risks little in terms of his relationships and pedagogical choices with students; a coach who fails to see the emotional turmoil below the surface of the shouts, kicks, and slide tackles of his young soccer players.

Just so I am crystal clear on this point: this movie does not in any way promote drinking on the job, especially for teachers. But the booze functions for each of the men in the story as it often does for those of us who drink it. It frees them up to try things they might not have otherwise tried. To break free from habits or ways of approach that are steadily destroying them.

At the start of the film we get a first impression of Martin, a history teacher at the school. He is so uninspired by his content and uninspiring to his students that fifteen to twenty of his students (and their parents) organize a meeting with him to express their concern with his teaching and how it will negatively affect them, especially as they prepare for the high-stakes exam at year’s end. A number of parents (and students) actually request a different teacher. It’s not clear how many of them are granted the request.

But as the “another round” experiment progresses, Martin begins to bring his newfound interest in world leaders’ relationship to alcohol into the classroom. He surprises the students by getting them to “blind vote” for the basically teetotaling Hitler over FDR and Churchill, after describing only their personal lives and drinking habits.

Students at the high school the teachers work at—and, according to the characters in the film, the people of Denmark itself—drink constantly. So, it’s not so much the “what” of the teachers’ alcoholic choice but the “when” that is most surprising. Perhaps predictably, the four teachers find themselves going beyond and off the (guard)rails of their .05 blood alcohol requirement. The film does not gloss over the ugliness of this descent into alcoholism, nor see their ‘experiment’ apart from that reality.

At the same time, it’s undeniable that the experiment nudges Martin’s character into facing his own failure to show up in his marriage. And as he faces that failure, the film makes it clear to us that his absence from the marriage is inextricably connected with his absence for so many years as a real and vital teacher in the classroom. While the FDR/Hitler/Churchill voting activity might have questionable pedagogical value, it at least showed Martin trying to integrate something that mattered in his personal life into what he was doing as a teacher.

This idea of integration, by which I mean a teacher who brings their whole self to what they are doing in the classroom, is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. And as it concerns those teachers like me who also have a writing vocation, I think that means authentically modeling what it looks like to engage in the often messy process of writing and rewriting a piece to share with a real human audience. And, as much as possible, to facilitate these messy, real experiences for students.

A film like Another Round inspires me to bring my own experiences as a writer (and now publisher and editor) into the classroom. To do this in a way that is not self-serving (you know, the professors who requires students to buy their book for the course) is a challenge in this regard, but I think one that’s worth taking on. At any rate, the integration of more of my writing/editing/publishing life experience (but not booze) into the classroom is one I’ll be leaning into this year, 2025-2026. Looking forward to sharing more of that experiment with you here, reader.

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Notes

I wanted to share a few other representations of teachers that go against the grain of the heroic, cue-the-violins type vision we often see in films about teaching and school. And ones, that like Another Round, are both honest about the profession of teaching and that also provoke questions about systems of schooling. Here are a few that came to mind:

-Stoner by John Edward Williams
An encounter with the reading and study of literature leaves the title character utterly changed, but his dedication to the reading, study, and then teaching of it doesn’t produce flashy results. Stoner is never a particularly popular professor, takes a long time to be competent, and alienates many with his abrupt honesty. I love the quietness of the presentation, though, and the way the novel takes his entire life in teaching and learning about literature. And though the faculty / student drama here happens from World War I and II in the U.S., there’s an aspect of that piece that feels timeless to this reader.

-Critical Magic Theory with Professor Julian Wamble
My better half, a true Potterhead, got me into the book series when we first met, and recently introduced me to this show with its wonderful and thoughtful host, Julian Wamble. As those more versed than I Potter lore know well, the series is known for asking some big questions about schooling and education, especially in its later books. I highly recommend Professor Wamble’s episode, “The Devil Wears Pink: The Violence, Villainy, and Vanity of Dolores Umbridge” (as well as his follow-up to that that engages listener responses.) It got me to re-examine my own response to this easily-hatable character and to consider how that response connects to systems of oppression in the world we all live in. And, if I can find the time, it might even get me to re-read book 6, Order of the Phoenix. (But we’ll see about that last one.)

-The Horse’s Mouth (film)
I’m sure the novel is a wonder, too, but in truth I haven’t read it, though I’ve watched the film starring Alec Guinness a whole bunch of times. Guinness plays the main character, a painter, Gulley Jimson, who creates equal parts brilliant art and total mayhem for all those who encounter him. I’ll have more to say on this movie in a future Stack, but for the purposes of this post, I wanted only to say that the way that Gulley as a character (and the film as a whole) refuses to romanticize artists or artmaking is beautifully done. As is the “master / apprentice” relationship between Gulley and his gofer Nosey (played by Mike Morgan) who turns in a beautiful and touching performance.

-What about you, reader? Any representations of teachers and schools that feel honest, compelling, true? Please do share!