Stand and Deliver (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Ramón MenéndezRelease Date(s)
1988 (March 26, 2024)Studio(s)
American Playhouse/Warner Bros. (Warner Archive Collection)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: B+
- Extras Grade: D-
Review
Stand and Deliver is a potent tribute to Jaime Escalante, who helped to revitalize the teaching of mathematics in underprivileged communities. Escalante was born and educated in Bolivia, but he later emigrated to the United States and eventually ended up finding a home at Garfield High School in Los Angeles in 1974. There, he started to overhaul the system in order to provide more opportunities for young people to get a head start, and by 1978 he was beginning to teach them calculus. That led to some of his students taking the Advanced Placement Calculus Test, which many of them passed. By 1982, 18 of his students passed the test, but the Educational Testing Service questioned their scores due to perceived anomalies in the results, and they demanded that 14 of the students retake the test. 12 of them agreed, and when they passed again, their original scores were reinstated.
By 1990, Escalante’s math program had grown to include 400 students at various levels, but he had already lost the support of the new school administrator, and he left Garfield a year later. In many ways, he had become a victim of his own success, with class sizes growing to unmanageable levels, which drew the wrath of the teacher’s union. Between that and the academic apathy of the new administrator, there was no real future for his math enrichment program (a fact that’s borne out by the plummeting test scores of the students after he left). Yet in a bitter irony, Escalante had also become the victim of a very different kind of success. The release of Stand and Deliver in 1988 brought national attention to him, but that fed back negatively at Garfield High School, and he started to receive hate mail and even death threats. A film that had been created as a tribute to his efforts ended up helping to bring them to an end.
Yet Stand and Deliver has only grown in its influence over the decades since then, with it being used as a way to motivate students and teachers alike. It helps that the film omits the bittersweet conclusion of Escalante’s story in order to focus narrowly on what happened in 1982. That turned it into an unambiguously triumphant saga, a tale of a teacher and his students who work together to defy not just the odds, but the prejudicial attitudes of others as well. Some people just couldn’t accept the fact that underprivileged students could achieve this kind of success in higher mathematics, and while the Educational Testing Service did raise some valid concerns regarding the Garfield test results in 1982, it’s hard to imagine that the socioeconomic and ethnic status of the students didn’t play at least a partial role in why the ETS chose to target Escalante’s class.
Stand and Deliver was the brainchild of UCLA Film School graduates Ramón Menéndez and Tom Musca, both of whom secured the rights to tell Escalante’s story for the princely sum of $1.00. They still struggled to secure financing for the film itself, but eventually pulled together the funds from various grants, and even more importantly, they eventually gained the backing of American Playhouse. Musca produced, Menéndez, directed, and the two of them wrote the script together, compressing everything that happened between 1974 and 1982 into a single year. As a result, the film does give an inaccurate impression of how quickly the students were able to progress from basic mathematics to advanced calculus, implying that Escalante was able to work miracles that just aren’t possible in real life.
Menéndez and Musca also chose to fictionalize the students, with only one of them being loosely based on a real participant in the testing that year. They cast Lou Diamond Phillips as another one of the students, fresh of his success in La Bamba the previous year, but all the rest were played by relative unknowns including Vanessa Marquez, Will Gotay, Ingrid Oliu, and Daniel Villarreal. (Fans of Batman: The Animated Series will recognize Oliu as the voice of Officer Renee Montoya.) Yet the real key to the success of Stand and Deliver was the addition of Edward James Olmos as Escalante. Olmos delivered a towering performance, and he became so dedicated to bringing Escalante to life as honestly as possible that he helped to shape the development of the script—although the real Escalante still referred to the results as being “90 percent truth, 10 percent drama.” Yet while Stand and Deliver may indeed treat the hard work that Escalante’s students actually performed in a dramatically abbreviated fashion, the film still captures the essence of the kind of teacher/student partnership that’s essential for success in education:
“There will be no free rides, no excuses. You already have two strikes against you: your name and your complexion. Because of those two strikes, there are some people in this world who will assume that you know less than you do. Math is the great equalizer. When you go for a job, the person giving you that job will not want to hear your problems; ergo, neither do I. You’re going to work harder here than you’ve ever worked anywhere else. And the only thing I ask from you is ganas. Desire. If you don’t have the ganas, I will give it to you, because I’m an expert.”
The late cinematographer Tom Richmond shot Stand and Deliver on 35mm film using Arriflex cameras with spherical lenses, framed at 1.85:1 for its theatrical release. This 1080p version is supposedly based on a 4K scan of the original camera negative, but honestly, it looks a bit like a 2K scan of an interpositive instead. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the image lacks the clarity that’s often associated with negative scans. It may simply be a matter of the stocks that Richmond used, but there’s definitely a dupey look here. Regardless, it’s not necessarily a bad thing because the results still look nicely filmic, as clean as possible yet with no obvious signs of digital tinkering. Colors, contrast, densities, and grain reproduction are all spot-on. It’s a digitally-reproduced film that still looks like film, and regardless of source, it’s hard to criticize that fact. Plus, it’s the first time that Stand and Deliver has been released in proper widescreen, since all previous versions including the LaserDisc and DVD were open-matte 1.33:1.
Audio is offered in English 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English subtitles. The dialogue is clear with just a touch of excessive sibilance that gives it a slightly harsh edge—there are more than a few whistling “esses” to be had here. The dynamics are solid, however with a decent amount of low end extension that benefits’ Craig Safan’s memorable score. It’s a solid mono track.
The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray release for Stand and Deliver is one of their typically bare-bones efforts for this kind of film. There’s just a single extra:
- Original Theatrical Trailer (Upscaled SD – 1:17)
Obviously, that’s something of a lost opportunity. There are plenty of retrospective examinations of Stand and Deliver, including ones put out by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, The American Film Institute, and others. Edward James Olmos has always been happy to talk about his work on the film, so he’s been on the record for a long time. That’s a decent quantity of pre-existing content that only needed to be licensed—which may well be the problem, of course. It’s tough, but the reality these days is that it’s wonderful that films like Stand and Deliver are available in any form at all. Short of a boutique label working out a deal with Warner Bros., this is probably the only Blu-ray version of the film that we’re ever going to get. Lack of extras or not, this is still a major upgrade from the old open-matte DVDs, and it’s recommended for that fact alone.
-Stephen Bjork
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