‘Bad Education’ Review: A Scandal With Smarts The real-life story of malfeasance inside a suburban New York school system brings a human perspective to financial crime. By John Anderson

Posted By on April 24th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bad-education-review-a-scandal-with-smarts-11587674969?mod=opinion_reviews_pos2

The rise and fall of Frank Tassone as told in HBO’s blackly comedic “Bad Education” is mostly about his fall and hinges, ever so Greekly, on his own hubris. Early on, Frank, the wildly popular, handsome and successful superintendent of the Roslyn, N.Y., school system on Long Island, is interviewed about an overly ambitious building project by a student journalist, who gets her quote and prepares to go. “It’s just a puff piece,” explains Rachel Bhargava (Geraldine Viswanathan), but Frank stops her in her tracks. “It’s only a puff piece if you let it be a puff piece,” he admonishes. “A real journalist can turn any assignment into a story.” What you feel then is just a tremor, but the foundation of Frank’s meticulously fabricated life is beginning to turn to sand.

Which it famously did. Frank Tassone and his assistant, Pam Gluckin—played with an actorly joy by Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney, directed by Cory Finley—were eventually indicted and convicted in an $11.2-million embezzlement scheme that involved houses in the Hamptons, vacations, plastic surgery, more vacations and Frank’s Park Avenue apartment. It was certainly the biggest crime of its kind that Roslyn had ever seen and made quite the impression on screenwriter Mike Makowsky, who was a student in Roslyn when Frank was indicted in 2004. Mr. Makowsky’s storytelling isn’t just true-crime. It’s true-human.

Corruption is, among other things, inconvenient. When Bob Spicer (Ray Romano) and the rest of the Roslyn board of education start losing their minds over the outrageous intramural pilfering—it’s discovered that Pam has been putting thousands in personal expenses on her school-district credit card—the board immediately wants to call the cops. But Frank—so sage, so political—reins them in: The high school has just been rated No. 4 in the country; the rate of Ivy League acceptances is phenomenal and, most important, property values in Roslyn are soaring compared with other towns on the North Shore of Nassau County. Pam’s exposure might well undo it all—would Harvard think twice about accepting kids from a scandal-plagued school system? No one wants to find out.

But no one knows the extent of the thievery either, and as portrayed by Mr. Jackman, Frank is a tightrope walker. He has political gifts, remembering everyone’s name, everyone’s child, even people he hasn’t had as students for 15 years—like Kyle (Rafael Casal), the dancer/bartender he takes up with during a boondoggle in Las Vegas. No one pays attention to the price of his suits or his surgeries, because Frank, like a human pyramid scheme, just keeps paying off. Until he doesn’t. And the resourceful Rachel—inspired by Frank—starts digging into the school system’s accounts.

“Bad Education,” like the film “Spotlight,” is a journalism story: No one really wants Rachel’s exposé, no one wants the dirty laundry aired—not even the school paper that she’s writing for. Ms. Janney looks like she might eat the girl when Rachel starts asking questions that let Pam know she’s about to be found out. Frank doesn’t threaten Rachel, he just lets her know how wrong these kinds of things can go when innocent people are smeared—her own dad has been unjustly accused, and fired, as part of an insider-trading prosecution. But she plugs away, in a virtual vacuum.“Bad Education,” which got laudatory reviews when it played last year at the Toronto Film Festival, doesn’t feel like a theatrical film. It feels perfect for a Saturday night on the couch (which works out well). There’s a scene late in the story when Frank goes on a rant before one of Roslyn’s cluelessly privileged parents about the unappreciated educator and the ungrateful taxpayer, but it’s difficult to tell exactly what’s up—is Frank trying to convince himself? It’s a delicate and memorable performance by Mr. Jackman. Ms. Janney does the whole Long Island thing as well as anyone ever has. The most resonant character, though, might be Rachel, whom Ms. Viswanathan imbues with the indignation of youth—something the rest of the characters have long outgrown, but which the story was always going to need.

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