Among the many remedies we have flung at our foundering inner-city schools is a force we have reckoned without: Maggie Gyllenhaal, raising hell in the feistily titled Won’t Back Down as a harried single mother eking out a living selling cars in a proletarian city, nobly represented under lowering skies by Pittsburgh.
Gyllenhaal’s Jamie Fitzpatrick comes kitted out in the uniform expressly designed in Hollywood for plucky working-class mom-heroines. She dresses like a mid-level slattern and has a back-talking mouth on her, but she’s all heart and unbeatable American optimism, not to mention a rabble-rousing tiger when it comes to the welfare of her daughter, Malia (Emily Alyn Lind), who’s dyslexic.
So much of a tiger, indeed, that despite her slender means, Jamie has managed to disgorge $60 on a school backpack. This would be folly on any income, but the bag quickly takes on prime plot value as a symbolic stick with which to beat the Underperforming, Furtively Texting Teacher (Nancy Bach) who’s selling Malia and her entire out-of-control class short. Hovering protectively behind that bad egg is the real villain of the piece, the teachers union. But more about that down the line, after the movie has paid its dues to some good teachers and some good union comrades who go against the grain.
Joining forces with Nona (the great Viola Davis), a disheartened educator at Malia’s failing public school who also has a learning-disabled son (Dante Brown), Jamie handpicks a few burned-out but salvageable teachers. Going door to door, Jamie and Nona recruit an army of madder-than-hell parents to take on a bound-and-gagged principal, the board of education and the dreaded union, the better to take over the school and do things right.