"Great ambition without contribution is without significance. What will your contribution be?"
Director Michael Hoffman takes us on a truly extraordinary experience in his latest movie, The Emperors Club. Kevin Kilne assumes the role of William Hundert, a Classics professor at St. Benedict's school for boys. Hundert has worked for 34 years to mold his students into bettering themselves and our society by applying lessons they’ve leaned from ancient conquerors of the world into their own.

However, in 1972 the arrival of trouble maker Sedgewick Bell (Emile Hirsch) sends Hundert’s sense of steeply held tradition and excellence into disorder and chaos. Sedgewick's mischievousness ranges from cheating, to distributing pornography, to an attempted skinny dipping with girls across the river at the nunnery. Sedgewick’s corruption on the other boys in the class appears to greatly demean Hundert’s molding of the boys. However, when Hundert publicly embarrasses Sedgewick with his inability to remember any of the 41 emperors the class has studied and Sedgewick’s classmates are able to name all of the emperors in alphabetical order, we realize the truth in the quote “ignorance can be cured, only stupid lasts forever”

After Hundert has a brief meeting with Sedgewick’s father U.S. Senator Bell (Harris Yulin), Sedgewick appears to clean up his act by studying and writing essays to compete in the Mr. Julius Ceaser contest. Several weeks pass during which Sedgewick’s essays becoming increasingly better written. Finally the last essay is completed and late at night in a dark corner office we see Hundert changing Sedgewick’s final essay grade to an A+ so that he can compete in the contest, and the old saying: “Corruption affects us all” begins to surface. Although Sedgewick eventually loses the debate and goes on to be much like his father, Hundert never seems to get over his disillusionment.

Like all good movies, the end goes back to the beginning, and we’ve got the same people competing in the same contest with the same outcome. We’re left with the idea that people never change.

Kevin Kline’s acting was phenomenal, and some of the quotes he lectures his students on are truly thought provoking. Directing was top notch, the school was filled with boisterous little brats going about their lives and the scenery was gorgeous. The movie also remains true to life in it’s portrayal of Sedgewick remaining a cheater. It seems all too often these days characters in conventional cinema undergo these life changing epiphanies before our eyes and become what we want them to be, thankfully that has not occurred here. All in all it was an excellent intellectual film, and I would highly recommend it to someone who enjoys movies like A Beautiful Mind, or Dead Poet’s Soceity. Such great films that question morals and ethics of modern society are truly rare, and should be cherished.

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