Oleanna is less about the education process – or is it? – than about the social interaction between student and college professor.
Are you saying you found his Soviet WWII sniper in *Enemy at the Gates *unrealistic? That’s the role that announced to the world: “look out, Richard Kiel, there’s another ‘Jaws’ in town!”.
(This one’s with regular chompers, not a mouthful of metal.)
Probably just to try to make the movie a little more accessible. But in terms of what they’re actually doing and how they’re behaving, it’s actually a pretty good portrait of grad school (though obviously sensationalized).
Haven’t seen it. But The Last Supper predates it.
I think the canonical work in the “life of a young academic” genre is “Lucky Jim” by Kingsley Amis, although I suppose the protagonist technically isn’t a graduate student.
You did that on purpose, to hurt me, didn’t you?
Though come to think, in the novel, all the primary characters are post-docs or professors.
Come to think of it, Gwyneth Paltrow was also the lead in Proof. She did a decent job, I guess, but she really wouldn’t have been my first choice for casting.
The student character in Oleanna, Carol, is an undergrad, though, isn’t she?
Kate Beckinsale plays a grad student of genetics in Laurel Canyon
There is some talk about her ongoing thesis, but it’s not really a movie about the grad school setting.
Or understand that most of them are people who simply partied a lot as undergrads, and now just want to walk directly into a guaranteed, highly-paid corporate job. I can’t imagine a less interesting milieu for a movie.
The Paper Chase, is law school considered grad school?
I realize the OP mentions fiction specifically, but Naturally Obsessed is a documentary about graduate students pursuing PhDs in the molecular biology lab of Dr. Richard Shapiro at Columbia. It was filmed over the course of three years (!) tracking the progress of the students.
Intuition, by Allegra Goodman, is set in an academic biology lab, and focuses mostly on the postdocs. Technically, they’re past grad school, but I found that they reflected my own bio-lab grad student existential despair pretty well.