The English Teacher (2013)

I had an extended layover in an airport recently and I was having some trouble escaping the Sunday football games, so I was looking for something to pass the time that would not require that it be completely quiet (and yes, I do think that it might be time to think seriously about noise reducing headphones, but I travel so lightly these days that I have been slow to devote the space they require--but I may have to bite that bullet, I admit it).

 I decided to spend some time on Netflix looking for something light to watch, and this is what I came up with--and for me, it worked perfectly.  Julianne Moore plays a middle aged high school English teacher who gets sucker punched by one of her former students.  She breaks all sorts of rules and makes promises she can't keep in order to get her former student's play staged at her high school. Her boundaries become so tenuous that she actually has sex with her former student--they are both adults and it is not a violation of any law, but it demonstrates how much she really wants the whole thing to work out. Nathan Lane plays the director to perfection, and Greg Kinnear plays the father of the play write.  Over the course of the movie, the English teacher starts to see where her blind spots have been and moves towards a more mature perspective on both the play and her life as a whole.  She manages to emerge with a new lease on life, and a romance that is age appropriate to boot.