Even the most inspirational teachers will discover that a handful of students will get away from them, twisting their key lessons into awful perversions or discarding them altogether. For all its burnished, empty-headed schmaltz, Dead Poets Society at least had the courage to leave one young scholar behind, as his newfound intellectual freedom smacked against a wall of authoritarian values. With a rod firmly lodged in its posterior, The Emperor's Club focuses on an ethical infraction of negligible significance that still haunts a high-starch Classics professor for the better part of 25 years. Expanded from an Ethan Canin short story (The Palace Thief), the film is an old-fashioned morality play writ extra-large, applying a heavy, austere tone to a sequence of events that can't bear the load. The burden falls mostly on Kevin Kline, who trades in his lithe, expressive comedic gifts for a dramatic role that fits him like a straitjacket and a pair of lead shoes. As the prized teacher at a swanky New England boys' school, Kline championed the great leaders and philosophers of ancient Western civilization to students who were actually well-connected enough to follow in their footsteps. Retired after 34 years on the job, he's given cause to reflect on the one blemish on his record, the troubled son of a corrupt West Virginia senator whose intellectual potential was held back by his rebelliousness and slippery principles. In flashback, the film recounts how the charismatic Emile Hirsch's arrival shakes Kline's grip over his well-disciplined students, who naturally become less interested in history lessons than the new kid's cache of Lucky Strikes and French nudie magazines. After a while, Kline's patience and fatherly guidance appear to have an impact on Hirsch, but in his eagerness to polish the rotten apple, he makes a minor, forgivable error in judgment that threatens to reverse all of his good progress. The Emperor's Club hews closely and serviceably to other films of the same subgenre, from To Sir, With Love to The Browning Version, but it's founded on a mixed message that it never attempts to unravel. Kline takes pride in molding his students to the ideals of the great Greeks and Romans, yet time and again, his voiceover narration insists that people are creatures of fate whose lives were predetermined from the beginning. "This is a story without surprises," he notes. On that point, he's correct in a way that the filmmakers never intended.