The Emperor's Club is quickest understood as an ideological rebuttal to The Dead Poets' Society, right down to the title. It makes even more sense if you know about the ancient, bitter, and eternally unresolved war between opposing sensibilities, Classical and Romantic. The subtext for both films is the 1960s, a bloody battle in this conflict, a victory or defeat, depending on your point of view. This review is primarily concerned with this backstory and how The Emperor's Club tries to hold up its end in this eternal see-saw, but fails miserably.

One way to understand the Classic/Romantic split is a painting by John Singer Sargent, in which heavenly Athena, pointing to the sky, contrasts with earthly Pan, pointing to himself. Classical is cold but beautiful, universal, and ideal. Romantic is warm-blooded and wondrous; dangerous and particular. Classicists distill human standards: their opponents decry these as arbitrary, suffocating and dictatorial. Romantics value passion and experience: their opponents fear these invite moral, emotional and aesthetic anarchy. Wiser heads see the eternal conflict as a matter of contradictory polarities, order and freedom, best held in balance. Yet even after centuries of fighting (in one form or another) to a stalemate, either extreme sees its opposite as enemy of all that is good, the fight as to the death.

Each of the two films we're discussing here champion one of these opposing schools of thought, staging a rigged fight with the other in a literal school: an elite prep school, in both cases, with virtually the same sort of ivy-league atmosphere and accouterments.

At Helton Academy, in The Dead Poets' Society, tradition is moribund and empty and following it (so goes the Romantic view) results in stultifying conformity. A brand new teacher, Mr. Keating, embodies the Romantic sensibility: he is fully alive, original, an individual, with a sense of wonder and the brevity of life. The most important task, he believes, is to wake students to their own unique inner light: "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" is the theme, and carpe diem: "seize the day". The movie's Baddie is one of the student's father: overbearing, pragmatic, tyrannical - the epitome of Authority for Romantics and Sixties' counterculture.

The Emperor's Club is set at St. Benedict's prep school, where tradition is alive and meaningful: one is constantly surrounded by Roman busts, paintings, fluted columns, and talk of virtue and transcendent value. Departures from this tradition, as Classical arguments go, pervert the best in human nature. The teacher here, Mr. Hundert, embodies the Classical tradition: he is virtuous, passionate about learning, with a sense of the eternity of values. His most important task is discipline, molding the shapeless students to The Good. "Stay on the path," is the theme. The Baddie is a student, Sedgewick Bell, a rebellious kid whose influence has his fellows sliding immediately into debauchery - which, by coincidence, is the Classical picture of both Romanticism and the Sixties.

The similarities between the films are too close to be accidental: there's even a scene in both films, at almost the exact same spot, where the students are taken by their teachers to view glass cases filled with old photos of long dead alumni: in Dead Poets, the message is: Be yourself. Time is short. In Emperor's Club, the advice is the opposite: Be like them. Eternal values are the only things that last.

The similarities, however, end there. Dead Poets is much more artful (director Peter Weir is a master craftsman), presenting a suitably Romantic defense of Romanticism, including Romantic tragedy, but with Romantic flaws that include the demonization of tradition - the result of too much heart and not enough head. Emperor's Club, on the other hand, is entirely bereft of both heart and head (despite the profusion of classical busts of Socrates and friends). This is a Classicist's rebuttal as if it had been written by Mortimer Adler and Maggie Thatcher. The film predictably demonizes Romanticism, but unlike Dead Poets, the portrayal of its favored point of view is entirely unconvincing: smarmy, conventional symbols without conviction, originality or life - a great argument, in fact, for ditching class and sneaking off to the woods to make barbaric yawps.

The story adaptation is, by turns, painfully literal or loopily free. Sedgewick Bell is the son of a powerful Senator, like his father sarcastic, cynical, and scornful of right in a world where might is what obviously counts. Sedgewick is Lampwick, who led Pinocchio astray, skipping school and smoking cigars. His fellow students fall cartoonishly under Sedgewick's spell instantly, and start acting like hooligans. In one laughable example (not in the original story at all), Sedgewick rows a few of the boys across the lake to a nearby girls school to carpe a little diem: they immediately find bad girls, who immediately agree to go skinny dipping, and they all immediately get caught. Stylistically, this film is an exemplar of the Reefer Madness School, or, more to the point, the Fifties Paranoia School, an expose of commies and hippies and other threats to Our Way of Life.

Indeed, it is instructive that the setting for the film was changed in a significant way from the short story on which it is based, from the mid-40s to the mid-70s. This change means that, as with so many recent discussions about Romanticism, the real strategy of the treatment is to convene a referendum on the Sixties. What Sedgewick brings into this Classical enclave, then, not just rebellion, but a particular kind of rebellion: his hair is long, the trunk at the end of his bed (the inside lid a montage of Mao, Jimmy Hendrix and dirty pictures) is essentially the Sixties in a box - Pandora's Box - we get the message, they're all delivered at full volume.

The original short story from which the film is made, Ethan Canin's "The Palace Thief," has everything The Emperor's Club lacks: nuance, irony, freshness, and a subtle and complex interplay of the ideal and the real. In that version, Mr. Hundert comes off less virtuous than as a blind, self-satisfied hypocrite who can't seem to admit to himself that he has played his part in the moral compromises for which he makes Sedgewick his scapegoat. Michael Tolkin's screenplay strips every bit of character and thematic shading, creating cardboard saints and villains, making the scapegoating of Sedgewick not the irony, but the strategy, of the whole story. This seems especially cynical at a time when filmgoers are particularly vulnerable to various kinds of flag-waving and moral scapegoating.

If your idea of compelling moral drama is Kieslowski's Decalogue, then chances are you found screenwriter Tolkin's last film Changing Lanes, if admirably principled, heavy-handed and cartoonish, and will find this film moreso. It must be even harder for the well-regarded Ethan Canin to watch: for he is, most ironically, placed in the position of his own hero: watching someone cynically manipulate the trappings of the classical tradition for their own pragmatic ends.

If that end is truly to make a convincing case for studying history or doing good in a cynical, nasty and violent world, The Emperor's Club fails at this, too. For a successful defense of that position, one must go to the most exclusive private school of our day — Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. In a society deprived of myth and morality by the Empire of Scientific Materialism (which also insists we "keep on the path"), people are hungry for moral choices in a universe where good and evil are understood in traditional ways: hence the popularity of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. This fact proves that the best means of inculcating classical virtues is not memorizing the names of emperors, but by engaging with the virtues in romantic stories. This is something defenders of the Romantic tradition, like J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis always understood and argued for.

As an aside, we point out that Lewis frequently did battle, often heated battle, as a self-described Romantic against self-described Classicists. Astonishingly, this has never stopped anti-Romantics from selectively quoting Lewis to attack Romanticism — or the Sixties. And while Lewis did not live to see much of that decade, a close study of his works will show him quite sympathetic to the most important underlying Romantic tendencies of the times; in any case, he is the exact wrong witness to call against Romantic rebellions.

In another aside, we note the curious career of Kevin Kline, straddling both sides of what was once called the Generation Gap. Before The Emperor's Club packaged up the Sixties so neatly in a box, the actor did Dave, a "liberal" fantasy by the director of Pleasantville (an impassioned defense of the Sixties), and The Big Chill, a film which suggested that even if ideals close-up are less than ideal, one should try to hold on to them in our very un-ideal universe. ("If you try sometimes, you get what you need.") That was also the message of another more balanced and sympathetic "school film" processing of the Sixties, Mr. Holland's Opus: in that film a Romantic idealist is trapped in what he perceives as a sell-out of his ideals, until he learns ideals are nothing if not channelled into everyday life: concrete relationships and acts.

Significantly, Mr. Holland's Opus features a temptation sequence, whereby the hero's ideals undergo a fiery trial from which he emerges by choosing the good. The Emperor's Club hustles Mr. Hundert through the years without any believable real-world testing of his ideals, certainly nothing that tempers his absolutism with humility and grace. That the screenwriter is aware of this lack is seen in his perfunctory subplot (another addition to the original story) involving a married lady friend to whom Mr. Hundert is obviously attracted and who later becomes conveniently available for him to marry: a prize for being a good boy, it seems.