Father James (Isaiah Washington) comes to a church-run boarding school
as the new teacher, and since he's the first black teacher of the school,
many think this spells trouble - yet Father James is quick to get the
necessary respect from students and teachers alike, and everything should
be fine ... only it isn't, there is a mystery surrounding the
disappearance of Father James's
predecessor Father Cooper, and there is a very troubled, medicated boy,
Parker (Jordan Garrett), whom Father James can make open up to him only
gradually - only to unearth something bigger, because it seems Father
Cooper has abused the boy. Eventually, the dead body of Father Cooper is
found, and since he still carried a container of the medication Parker is
taking with him, Father James figures Parker has killed him (after all, he
had a good motive), and he finds more and more evidence to corroborate
this, and when Parker makes a suicide attempt after having been questioned
by the police, that's as good as a confession. Then though the tables
are turned on Father James, because it turns out there was a case of abuse
at the last school he has worked at, and though everything was hushed up,
it soon becomes clear he had something to do with it. Father James
is fired from the school, and the headmaster, Father Jennings (Robert
Loggia), does everything to hush the whole affair up in the usual
way - when the school newspaper lands a scoop by revealing that
Father James actually tried to uncover the child abuse case at his former
school and was not a culprit - only there was no abuse, it was just a case
of blackmail, and thus father James had been lured into a trap somehow ... Rather
out of the blue, school bully and rich boy Jason (Andrew Lawrence) is
suddenly pulled out of the hat as the kiler of Father Cooper, Father
Jennings is relieved of his post as the school's headmaster, and Father
James is reinstated, to the joy of his students. As far as black
teachers in white schools-films go, this one is actually pretty good,
as a murder mystery, The Least of These at least remains
mysterious, and Isaiah Washington actually turns in a pretty good job as
the new teacher on the block. This though makes The Least of These
only an ok movie, no more: It's directed with such a lack of imagination it's
almost pathetic, and everything is done in such a good taste it betrays
the controversial subject matter - sexual abuse by priests - it's dealing
with. Apart from that, on a narrative level the film's final resolution
seems to be a little too pulled-out-of-the-hat to really satisfy, the
script as a whole could have needed a bit of ironing, and a few plotholes
could have needed fixing. But against all odds, this film is still 90+
minutes of an ok murder mystery, nowhere near as good, as eye-opening, as
controversial as it should have been, but still ok.
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