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By Misha Calvert
Half Nelson (co-written by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who also directed) turns the cliché, inner-city school plot on its head with Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), who empowers his junior high kids with history lessons while steadily unraveling his own life with drugs. You're meant to like Dan; he's book-smart, street-smart, funny and charming, stylish and cynical with the heart of a rebel. If you're a 20- to 30-year-old living in New York, he's just like someone you know, maybe even like you.
But you soon realize the activist in him borders on antisocial, ("baseheads don't have friends," says Dan's drug dealer,) and his confidence is really the flip side of cockiness, then womanizing, then just plain "asshole." You smack your forehead as Dan alternates between making a difference to his students and making a pompous, cracked-out fool of himself. He knows the damage he's doing, sort of, and in this knowledge finds a kind of deluded acceptance - pretending he has a choice in his addiction seems to him to be almost an exercise of his basic human rights. But Dan's recklessness leaves him looking more like a misguided student than a professor; ironic and tragic, this is the ultimate upheaval of the Hollywood classroom formula.
The movie is worth seeing for Gosling's nuance and complexity (which we've come to expect,) but he is almost outdone by his pint-sized co-star, Shareeka Epps. Making her feature film debut, Epps plays Drey, one of Dan's students and, ultimately, his only friend. Their relationship is odd on most counts and their conversations frequently are more silence than words. It is in the silences, however, that Gosling and Epps inhabit their characters best: Gosling swiping at his ever-sweating forehead and Epps having perfected the bold, sullen stare of age 13. Their wordlessness exposes both an unexpected fondness for each other and an acknowledgment of the absurdity of their bond. Defying the traditional architecture of white vs. black, teacher vs. student, sober vs. high, their friendship emerges as the film's only solution - albeit a knotty one - to the lack of proper adult guidance often blamed for the tarnish of modern youth. We finally begin to understand Dan's disillusionment when we meet his own quasi-dysfunctional family, and for all their differences we can see him and Drey as fundamentally the same: two lost children navigating in and around temptation.
Half Nelson affects you, but not with a crude and cliché assessment of modern race relations typical of the "urban classroom" genre. The script lets Gosling and Epps discard archetypes in favor of real people, each of which is delicately shaded with superior acting skill. As they disappear into their characters, you feel not that you're watching two actors, but that a real-time relationship is unfolding onscreen. Though one of the unlikeliest pairs in theaters this year, they are one of the most interesting and believable, and the lack of easy answers in their worlds will leave you with some provocative questions of your own.
0 9 . 0 4 . 0 6
Perpetual Toxins © 2006-2007 - All Rights Reserved |
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ough black kids from a bad 'hood are transformed by a white teacher...at least that's how Hollywood spins it. But what happens when the teacher is naughtier than the students?
