When the 20th Class Reunion of the Class of ’91 reunion comes up in 2011, Roger Wagner (Tim Steed) and Diane Wagner (Susan Miller) decide that they will do anything to impress their friends, especially the former homecoming king and queen, George (David Chattam) and Stella Henderson (Karenlie Riddering). After a dream in which he’s crowned the most successful former graduate, Roger decides that he’ll do anything to make his dream come true.
Unfortunately, when his boss fires him weeks before the reunion, he starts to realize how bad his family’s debt is. His family has grown so addicted to consumerism that it takes a major act of will and a major act of faith for them to dig themselves out of the hole they find themselves in.
Class of ’91 was created by Sharon & Fred Wilharm as a parable for problematic spending to be shown in churches and to be used with a new financial training curriculum they’re developing. To help them in this pursuit, they got famous financial counselor, Dave Ramsey, to allow them to use his voice and some music that’s been created for his show. This is an excellent idea and it’s great that the Wilharms had an idea of the type of audience and market they wanted to aim for.
Unfortunately, although they knew their target audience, they had difficulty reaching them in the first half of the film. This is because there are serious content issues that make the first half of the film feel strangely surreal and unbelievable.
One of the big stumbling blocks in this film was the acting that kicks it off. The film starts out in a class reunion, but folks are using such large hand gestures to “pantomime” talking to one another, that it’s very hard to take seriously. Worse, early acting performances are on par with the over-enthusiastic “big hand” movements. As it turns out, the intro is a dream sequence and perhaps the director wished to have it feel surreal. However, this means that this film was still opening with the worst acting in the film. The first ten minutes of a film are when people decide whether they will stay with a film or walk out on it, even in a very targeted audience situation like a church. You always want to start out with extremely solid performances at the beginning of a film to hook people and get them invested in the story.
From there until the halfway point of the film, the writing and acting continued to struggle. In order to drive home the point that the Wagners are obsessed with money, the writer/director became too heavy handed in the scripting process. (I had some serious issues with this same problem in my first film, so I completely understand how easy it can be to do this.) This leads to the audience feeling as though the filmmaker thinks they’re unable to grasp more subtle ways of exposition about the Wagner’s greed.
