Luce review: Octavia Spencer brings intensity to a teasing argument-starter

Dir: Julius Onah Cast: Naomi Watts, Octavia Spencer, Tim Roth, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Norbert Leo Butz, Andrea Bang. Cert: 15. Time: 110 min.

American theatre – from David Mamet’s Oleanna to the recent West End transfer Admissions – likes to get political by taking us back to school. The education system is a hotbed of juicy power dynamics: writers love milking classroom discord or parent-teacher spats to pick apart the workings of privilege, gender or racial bias.

Luce, a 2013 play by JC Lee and now a film by the Nigerian-American Julius Onah, seeks to do all of the above. It’s also a prime tease, presenting a series of debating points that it then twists or complicates with new information. You often feel you’re perched on quicksand – doubting a character’s integrity one minute, then feeling guilty the next, when a third party seems to have tricked them into a corner. Or have they, really? The play is all false walls.

It begins with a slick assembly address at a suburban high-school by high-achieving student Luce (Kelvin Harrison Jr), an Eritrean orphan raised, from 8 years old, as the only child of white foster parents (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth). Everyone warmly applauds the speech except his history teacher, fellow African-American Miss Wilson (Octavia Spencer), who has reason to doubt Luce’s credentials as some kind of new Obama in the making.

She confronts Luce’s mother with two things: a class assignment he’s done, diligently adopting the voice of the black revolutionary Frantz Fanon, and a paper bag she’s found in his locker containing illegal fireworks. Troubled by the rhetorical aggression she hears from Luce – who everyone else thinks is a spotless poster boy, as athletic as he is academically gifted – Miss Wilson seeks an intervention from his parents.

Watts’s Amy isn’t ready to challenge him about it, not wishing to disturb their tastefully bourgeois domestic harmony or undo the years of therapy that have brought Luce from a bullet-ridden war zone to this cusp of future promise. Besides, the locker has been searched without his permission; and it’s clear from an early scene that everyone uses everyone else’s. One of Luce’s sketchier friends could have brought the fireworks in, or Miss Wilson, for obscure reasons of her own, may be looking for simple excuses to sully his reputation and come out on top.

Keeping all these ambiguities alive, Lee and Onah make the mysterious antagonism between bright student and suspicious teacher into the lodestone here, while other allegiances (especially from the rift-prone parents) slip and slide around it. Does Miss Wilson – a struggling single woman whose sister (a harrowingly impressive Marsha Stephanie Blake) has serious mental health problems – resent the perfect life of this star pupil, or is she legitimately able to see through him in ways no one else can?

The script wants to delay answer the answer to this question as long as possible, but that’s a rod for its back: Luce can’t really scan as a real person. He's like an enigmatic onion we keep endlessly peeling layers off. Harrison, tested both here and in the forthcoming Waves, can only leap between modes – beaming all-star, then indignant victim, then edgy provocateur – without being given the glue to meld these facets into a character who adds up.

It’s Spencer’s performance that ends up packing most of the film’s heat. Where the other characterisations dither or flip-flop, hers deepens, intensified and shaken by the war of ideas. There’s a seething anger and disappointment to Miss Wilson that only gets more persuasive as her footing is pulled away.

If the film had found a means to concentrate on its core relationship – the way the infamously divisive Oleanna did – it might have worked like a contained explosion. But it drags in other characters for phonily manipulative ends – especially Luce’s timid ex-girlfriend Stephanie (Andrea Bang) – and plays dirty with a trumped-up charge of sexual assault, reported to Miss Wilson as a further way to dent her credibility.

The film’s nothing if not an argument-starter, with plenty of hot provocations – especially about the bargains underpinning black excellence – to toss out. They’re like firecrackers, though. You come out rattled, but half-certain you’ve been toyed with.

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