Alan Cumming in a still from My Old School, courtesy of the Sundance Institute.
The challenge of documentaries tackling sensational stories is that they are often undercut by pre-existing public awareness. I say this not to suggest that documentaries depicting well-covered circumstances are misbegotten, but rather to note that audiences often miss out on wonderful pieces because they assume they already know the contents. I imagine for some who grew up in Scotland in the 1990s, Jono McLeod’s My Old School functions in that way. Yet, for this American who had never heard of Brandon Lee or the events at the Glaswegian high school Bearsden Academy, the experience was entirely fresh. To speak in much detail is to ruin the central twist of McLeod’s work, so I will keep it simple. In 1993, a new student named Brandon Lee enrolled at Bearsden. He gradually became a star pupil and popular man amongst his peers and teachers alike. Yet, before too long, the lattice of Lee’s lies disintegrated.
One, of many mind you, of the first surprises, is that Lee chose not to be interviewed on camera even though he is the subject of the piece. He would, however, submit to an audio interview, and so McLeod enlisted an actor to lip-synch Lee’s interview so as to provide a living, breathing, performance. That actor is none other than Alan Cumming. It must be one of the oddest roles Cumming has ever stepped into, but he nonetheless delivers a wonderfully peculiar interpretation of, well, the body around Lee’s words and thoughts. It’s never clear whether Cumming saw Lee speak or simply invented mannerisms and expressions whole cloth. Regardless, I often found myself fuzzing over the particulars of the setup only to jolt back and remember in fact this was not Cumming’s story. Not quite reenactment nor fiction, it is a rather brilliant workaround.
While Cumming is flanked by an array of interviewees who were classmates of Lee’s and appear on camera as themselves, the majority of the film plays out in animation. Best embodied by the recent and exceptional animated doc Flee (2021), the style is an ideal match for a subject where identity is a touchy arena. Whereas Flee opted for realism with expressionistic flourishes, My Old School employs a technique closer to what you might see on Cartoon Network. It provides a retro vibe that fits the 90s storyline well, and compliments the literal old-school look of the classroom McLeod uses as an interview space for each talking head. However, one drawback of the style is that the characters have a limited expressive range, something that grows more jarring as the interviewees reveal more shocking information. A disconnect grows between their humanity and the comic strip appearance of the animations. It leaves me wondering if a different animation style may have delivered more poignant results.
Even so, the mixed media approach in My Old School is dynamic filmmaking emblematic of a creatively daring approach. Moreover, the Brandon Lee story is one of such unbelievable intrigue that, much like Three Identical Strangers (2018), it has all the fixings of a pulsating thriller. Yet, McLeod’s direction does the story a bit of a disservice by arriving onscreen in a form that could have used another edit. Sequences go on a few beats too long, losing the punchy thread that lies within them. Pertinent information and clips of spoken revelations pop back up again and again betraying either distrust of the audience’s ability to put the pieces together themselves or anxiety that the story would remain obtuse without them. As a result, a bonkers good story arrives to the audience much like a story your mother or father would tell you. It’s fun and engaging with all the right details, but they wander off here and there into vague territory so your focus drifts, leading the final details to land a touch mushier.
Taken in totality, My Old School is a documentary with a load of offbeat charm and some proper filmmaking within it that nonetheless suffers from narrative bloat. What I unequivocally take away from the experience however is that more financiers and studios should back documentary projects that set out to play with the medium. Animation is a rich and nearly boundless technique that can provide a tricky story with a vibrant way around narrative or character-related roadblocks. My Old School stands as an example of what a filmmaker can accomplish when open to the possibility of growing beyond the traditionally rigid ideas of what a ‘serious’ documentary can be. It may not entirely stick the landing, but there remains much to recommend it.
My Old School had its World Premiere in the Premieres section of Sundance Film Festival 2022.
Director: Jono McLeod
Rated: NR
Runtime: 104m
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Devin McGrath-Conwell holds a B.A. in Film / English from Middlebury College and is currently pursuing an MFA in Screenwriting from Emerson College. His obsessions include all things horror, David Lynch, the darkest of satires, and Billy Joel. Devin’s writing has also appeared in publications such as Filmhounds Magazine, Film Cred, Horror Homeroom, and Cinema Scholars.
