I love that movie.  It speaks to the lively, healthy spirit every child should be trying to keep and assert as they mature - not just as a good thing to do, but as the very purpose of life.  It was great that it was about thinking for themselves, but, to me it was deeper than that.  It was about taking on life for the shear personal joy of it.  It was the opposite of self-sacrifice - not on a didactic moral level, but on a personal experiential level.  It show-cased a most benevolent and exhuberent view of life as not a place that a person needed to fear or shrink from.

I'm sorry, Teresa, but I hated Kevin Dettmar's review as much as he hated the movie.

He so badly missed the mark that it is sad. He criticizes Dead Poets' Society for not getting the details of literary criticism right?!?!?!  Would he criticize Moby Dick because they used the wrong length of harpoons?  Or Atlas Shrugged because of the color the locomotive was painted?

He was terribly upset for how it portrayed his profession! I'm so glad that I didn't have him for a professor, and would so have enjoyed having Robin William's Professor Keating instead.  I'll grant that a degree of literary license was involved in the movie, and that there are things that needed to be taught at the humdrum level of literary analysis in a real class, but this wasn't Introduction to Poetry 101 - IT WAS A MOVIE! And why would anyone want it to be a docudrama that faithfully registered each little squib of information on the day to day details of teaching poetry?

That film was about waking up and living life. About finding your energy, your boldness, your joy - and he is concerned with a split infinitive!

Why should we find ourselves in the position of having to tell a phD in English lit about themes and storylines and plots? And someone needs to tell Dettmar that his accusation of "anti-intellectual" doesn't hold water.

I watched it again last night. Prior knowledge removed some of the tension. Of course, it was easier to see the disaster forming.  For me, the defining scene was as Keating was packing, he looked out the window and saw the Latin teacher, peripatetically leading his students along the path, identifying the plants, the stones, the building in Latin.  At the beginning of the movie, Latin was the classroom chanting of the declension of agricola - not once but twice.  Keating had shown another teacher how to bring his subject into the living experience of the students. 

The story by Tom Schulman (Wikipedia bio here) is "semi-autobiographical" (Wikipedia Dead Poets Society here).  Critic Kevin Dettmar missed one point: the film was shot at St. Andrews in Delaware, but was based on Schulman's life at Montgomery Bell Academy in his hometown of Nashville.  (He later attended Vanderbilt and finished a BA in philosophy.) Schulman has several screenplays to his credit.  Dead Poets Society is as much a writer's story about writing.  

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees
---Those dying generations---at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 8/10, 2:22am)