Review by Peter Veugelaers © 2007

Brian is a young man who wants to be smart although he admits it is hard work. He’s no prodigy. Going to university, the American equivalent of college is a quest for knowledge. He would make his father proud, Mum says. University is a also a chance he stumbles upon to make trivia, or seemingly dry intellectual text book knowledge, to look acceptable by getting on board the team for University Challenge quiz shows, run during the 1980s in England, the time this movie is set.

Most of Starter for 10 is examining how Brian (James McAvoy, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Last King of Scotland) navigates his way through the territory of his bio-chemical romantic and social attachments, a sort of coming of age set in the appropriate realm of the education institution where growing up seems to be done.

He is drawn to Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Alice (Alice Eve) for different reasons. One’s a social activist viva the reign of Apartheid and the move towards gay rights and equal rights for women. Her activism is paralleled in a sour, forthright manner. At the beginning of the movie she attends a party for “Vicars and Tarts”, of which she is neither. A straight cynical arrow, there’s more to her than we know.

The university types are spread broadly and with a touch of light hearted humour, from the proudish stiff upper lip of Benedict Cumberbatch’s University Challenge team captain, to the roustabout antics of Brian’s roommates, who are seeking their own identities through sloshing it up and dressing in drag.

The humour is slight for a comedy, with highs and lows, one of them being how Brian’s girl interest Alice has parents who walk around the house naked, which explains her frivolousness underneath a decadent charm. Alice is the glamorous, but not too dumb blonde, who is also on the quiz team and has been around the circuitry of guydom all too easily, which seems to be out of Brian’s depth.

Out of the university domain is Brian’s past, an ordinary life consisting of unemployed friends, a wharf, down-to-earth 80-s music, a simple house, and a caring mother. This is one intersection, between his new and old lives, where the script verges deftly in-between the issue of what’s really important in life: trivia predominates education on the screen, as if the reason for being at university is a quiz show, girlfriends overwhelm Brian, sex seems to be mainly on Alice’s mind, in discrete ways, and activism competes for the attention of Rebecca. Is knowledge all that important, then? What about activism? Hey, what about love and acceptance, those novel abstractions?

These are layered characters, with solid, engaging performances, keeping a droll storyline afloat. It’s all together likeable. It carries itself with an attractive scene-by-scene lightness thereby centring the heavier scenes to effect. Even though the basic idea is predictable from the outset (the rest of the movie syntactically explores this idea, albeit skilfully), it develops, in a few strands, into the movie’s key challenge: connecting with each other in not merely physical or brawn tones, but pure and platonically. It’s the quality of genuineness and surprise.