All of the actors in this little movie are surprisingly good, but the screenplay, direction and musical score are irritating, to say the least.
The story is stupid from the very first scene (in which Charles the high school guidance counselor nags at a fat kid for masturbating in the restroom) all the way through to the very end. I can't believe that any real human being would do or say anything that appears in this movie, and if they did it should never be filmed. And if the movie really does advocate staying in the closet (ie, lying to the school administrators AND to the kids who trust you) in order to keep your job -- as it seems to -- it REALLY should not have been made.
The direction seems to accentuate everything that's wrong in the screenplay. The scenes that stick most persistently and annoyingly in my memory are the pointless, endless, irritating, Charles-supervised confrontation between the girl and her erstwhile date-slash-jacket-thief (in the boy's home, which they invaded); and the coach's slow, loud, percussive clapping near the end, after Charles tells him something the audience (annoyingly) isn't allowed to hear.
The score is almost worse. A loud, intrusive clicking noise in the diner scene turned out to be music; and a relentless jollity toward the end demands that we take this movie as a comedy, despite the fact that absolutely nothing funny happens in it.
The writing, directing and music are so uniformly and consistently bad that it's easier to imagine that the movie is intended to be annoying than that the writer, director and composer are just incompetent -- but then why did they hire such good actors?
Whatever was going on in the creators' minds when they made this movie, it didn't work.
