Like Ebert, you might consider Dead Poets Society “a collection of pious platitudes masquerading as a courageous stand in favor of something” and “shameless in its attempt to pander to an adolescent audience.”
The thing is, though, if you’re a bookish 14-year-old girl, you haven’t yet seen a hundred “other stories in which the good die young and the old simmer in their neurotic and hateful repressions.” And compared to Hollywood’s usual attempts at pandering to you, which in 1989 almost exclusively feature proms, shopping malls, and the high-school football team, you will gladly take one that foregrounds romantic poetry, New England autumn landscapes, and a bunch of unabashedly nerdy teenaged boys wearing navy duffel coats and falling in love with their English teacher.
If you’re a bookish 14-year-old girl in 1989, in fact, Dead Poets Society is the single greatest event in the history of cinema, never mind what Ebert thinks.
And if you’re a depressed, bookish 14-year-old girl in 1989—undiagnosed, untreated, fascinated by suicide both as a subject and (not always, but not never) an option—Dead Poets Society might even be one of the things that helps you stay alive.