Saw it last night. What a disappointment – the first time anything from the pen of Alan Bennett has ever left me cold. Fine acting all round, and lots of mild chuckles in the cinema early on, but they were the sort of knowing, "we're smart, too" noises that Woody Allen's audience has to resort to nowadays. Not having seen the play, I now find myself wondering how it could possibly have been as good as the critics claimed. I know the film script is a lot more concise, but even so...
As I went to Oxford from a comp (’78) I thought I might glimpse a tiny bit of myself. But I couldn’t. Why he even set it in the Thatcher era, when those hyper-articulate, bookish, Rodgers & Hart-singing boys clearly belonged in the Forties or Fifties, is beyond me. I don’t expect stolid realism from AB – he’s much too clever to go round beating the drum – but this didn’t work as any sort of parable either. And as for the gay theme, well, let's be polite and just say it was highly implausible.
Sunday Times critic Cosmo Landesman is less diplomatic:
If this vision of enlightened tolerance and rampant homoeroticism in an average grammar school isn’t a gay fantasy, tell me what is. Even more fantastic is the fact that so many people think "The History Boys" is not only entertaining, but a serious work of art that asks important questions about the purpose and practice of education. Ha! If you want to see the dumbing-down of our culture, see this film. It is rare to see a work so dramatically inept, intellectually vacuous and morally glib.