‘Invisible’ School Teacher Upgraded from America to Alba

Posted by Neil Miller (neil@filmschoolrejects.com) on September 8, 2008

Oh Hollywood, you will never cease to know what really revs my engine, will you? Variety is reporting today that Jessica Alba has signed on to replace America Ferrera in a cinematic adaptation of “An Invisible Sign of My Own,” a book by Aimee Bender. It tells the story of a young woman who has retreated from the world and is consumed by numbers and math. Things begin to change when she becomes a second-grade math teacher, though.

For Alba, the nerdy intellectual hottie character is one with which she is familiar, having played similar roles in Good Luck Chuck and Fantastic Four, but “Invisible” appears to present a much more interesting proposition altogether — it is a significantly more dramatic turn than we’ve seen her take in the past. The novel was described by Village Voice book critic Ben Marcus as being “dark and authentically perilous.” The character of Mona, which we can assume will be Alba’s role, is described as having a “special talent to see, in numbers, forecasts of awful events.” There was also the following passage from Marcus’ review of the book, which I found to be intriguing:

Mona, a math teacher, presides over a class of second-graders who make the kids from Lord of the Flies look like sweethearts. In a show-and-tell called Numbers and Materials, Mona’s students search for real-life objects that resemble numbers. Seems innocent enough, but in this soon-to-be-bloody world such exhibitionism is never simple, and never harmless. A girl whose mother has cancer brings in a zero she’s made from an IV tube, someone makes a five out of meat, and a little boy arrives with a large jar preserving his father’s severed arm. It’s meant to be a one.

As you might expect, I would usually chalk up a movie with Jessica Alba taking top billing as just another reason for Hollywood to proliferate her hotness, but this project has some serious potential. If screenwriters Pam Falk and Mike Ellis (The Wedding Planner) can keep with the book’s dark, twisted tone and director Marilyn Agrelo (Mad Hot Ballroom) resists the urge to make this another silly, Jessica Alba in peril movie, we might have something to be excited about. At this point, all we can do is wait and see — and keep the image of Jessica Alba as a sexy teacher in our minds. That will help pass the time.

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