Sundance Review: Alan Cumming In Documentary ‘My Old School’

Most kids wouldn’t want to endure high school twice, although there are some who would no doubt prefer to remain there forever. Brandon Lee (no, not the late actor son of Bruce Lee) chose a third path by re-enrolling when he was 32 years old and getting away with it, at least for a while. How it all happened is whimsically recounted in My Old School, a clever, amusing and rather slight account of a Scottish misfit’s most irregular education. Or, as Woody Allen used to describe himself, it’s “thin but fun.”

“The man at the heart of this story does not want to show his face. But you will hear his voice,” some narration declares early in the film, which debuted in the Premieres section of the just-wrapped Sundance Film Festival. The face you see instead is of that most nimble of actors, Alan Cumming, who, in a virtuoso on-camera turn worthy of a best special effects award, impeccably lip-syncs the words we hear the actual Brandon Lee speaking.

Lee, for reasons of his own, did not want to participate on-camera in this uniquely bizarre account, which pulls back the curtain on a sadly fascinating life that, for the sake of the central figure’s life arc, could now use a robust third act, if he were to allow it. It’s a variant on the grown-up Howard Stern’s sitting in one of his grade school classes in the film version of his book Private Parts; more bizarre, perhaps, if not as funny.

The place and time were the Bearsden Academy in an upscale Glasgow suburb in 1993, and it is no doubt no coincidence that the documentary’s director, Jono McLeod, attended the school at the same time. Sporting a mild Canadian accent, Brandon turned up there for the equivalent of junior high school in the wake of his opera singer mother’s death, coincidentally just a couple of months after the actor Brandon Lee was accidentally killed while filming The Crow in Hollywood.

Before long, we learn, the poor boy’s father died, and then his grandmother as well. All the same, the kid flourished, acing his academics, taking the school’s sole Black student under his wing and, as captured on video, starring and singing (not terribly well) “Younger Than Springtime” in a school production of South Pacific.

As there is no other extant footage to be had from those school days, McLeod employs a good deal of animation to bring the lad’s teen years alive, which is fun enough at first but does begin to wear out its welcome after awhile. For a story that, however odd and at times mysterious, doesn’t have all that much to sustain it other than its utter and complete oddness, it’s very fortunate to have Cumming on board to so impeccably match his lip movements to the recording done by Lee.

Despite all the skills and smarts, Lee couldn’t cut it in med school in Glasgow; some years later he tried again, with the same dire results. What he did finally succeed in doing was to return to Bearsden, an outrageous roll of the dice which he pulled off for some time, even if it still didn’t have the desired result of catapulting him into med school; ironically, by then he was considered too old. There he was, some 15 or more years older than his fellow students, hoping that, as an alternative personality, he might finally push his way into becoming a doctor.

In its ideal form, My Old School would have been somewhat shorter and the animation style ultimately does reach the limits of its own charm. But what one is nonetheless left with a monumental and ballsy charade, a con of the first order that, in the end, didn’t do much for anyone except for the filmmaker and, now, the public.