Worth: $15.00
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Cast:
Alan Cumming, Brian MacKinnon, Stefen Addo
Intro:
… certainly interesting, and Cumming does a wonderful job …
In the mid-nineties, a case of identity fraud shocked Scotland. Not because the person involved was stealing people’s identities and running money-making schemes, but because the person created a new identity to go back to high school (the high school that he originally attended) as a man in his early thirties and pretended to be sixteen years old.
Jono McLeod, the director of the partially animated documentary My Old School, actually went to the school in question at the time of the incident. The school was the relatively posh Bearsden Academy (well, posh by the standards of schools nearby) and the student who lived a bizarre double life was Brandon Lee (here portrayed by Alan Cumming who is lip-syncing his voice).
The documentary begins with a statement; “The subject of this film does not want to show his face. But you will hear his voice.” To that end, Alan Cumming, who was originally slated to appear in a biopic of Brandon Lee back in the nineties, takes on the role of Brandon the “real life” person, and also the part of Brandon the animated person.
In 1993, Brandon Lee enrolled in Bearsden Academy. He was immediately spotted by fellow students for looking a bit off. Some of them thought he was a substitute teacher when he first arrived in the classroom. Little by little, despite their immediate reservations, the students were won over by Brandon. He was generous to other students, particularly the bullied Stefen Addo. He made friends, although Lee (actually Brian MacKinnon) has stated that he merely saw other students as ciphers.
The documentary plays out as both a character study for the clearly disturbed MacKinnon, and an investigation into how memory works. McLeod interviews the now adult students who were teens at the time that Brandon Lee was their school mate. Each recollection is slightly different and often contradictory. Only when the film goes back and actually plays recordings of MacKinnon made during his performance as the lead in the school musical do the Bearsden Academy students realise how much they’ve misremembered or were conditioned not to remember by MacKinnon’s later appearances on talk shows, after he was caught out with his bizarre fraud.
Even the documentary can’t explain certain aspects of what happened. MacKinnon was born into near poverty and moved with his mother to the wealthier Glasgow suburb of Bearsden as a child. His family was working class – his dad was a lollipop man. They lived in a council flat. Yet at times, Brandon Lee had the funds to just get on a plane and get out of Scotland.
MacKinnon originally went to Bearsden Academy in the mid-seventies. He did well at school and got into medicine at Glasgow University in 1980. Something happened and he failed his exams (MacKinnon is deliberately opaque about this and blames the university for lying about his marks and transcripts). He ended up back with his parents, working a minimum wage cleaning job, and plotting how he would eventually get back into university to become a doctor. Through his ruse, he did get into Dundee University, but once again, he ended up back at home (we don’t know why). He never got a degree.
The ruse is so complicated and fascinating that it would be unfair to spoil it. Needless to say, it wasn’t the plan of a balanced mind (MacKinnon believes he can mesmerise people). How did he get away with it for so long? Possibly a mix of increasingly complex lies, possibly the school not wanting to too closely investigate a seemingly talented student, possibly because his school mates were sixteen and were just going with the flow.
As interesting as the documentary and the subject are, McLeod’s insistence on letting us know how the class ended up in life is redundant and too long. People may get a bit invested in Stefen, but otherwise, the group aren’t all that interesting. The Daria influenced animation to tell the story is solid and clever.
Stefen asks at one stage “What is a person?” It is a pertinent question when dealing with someone like Brandon Lee. Brian MacKinnon still lives in Bearsden and can be seen wandering the street and using the local libraries. Brian MacKinnon had a single obsessive goal and ruined two versions of his life in the process.
For anyone who wishes they could go back in time and fix mistakes that they made in their youth, My Old School serves as a warning that you can never go back, especially if you’re taking yourself with you. Brandon Lee/Brian MacKinnon is a man who will forever be running on the one spot because he could not see past a single goal. McLeod’s documentary brings that fact to light, but it never completely investigates MacKinnon’s state of mind. It’s up to the audience to intuit his various possible personality disorders.
My Old School is certainly interesting, and Cumming does a wonderful job, but in the end, you’ll still be wondering about too many aspects. McLeod is just as confused as everyone else and even when pretending frankness, MacKinnon still keeps his secrets close.
