untitled
HALF NELSON
Directed by: Ryan Fleck
Internet Movie
Database Entry for full details
GRADE: A/A- (3.4/4)
2006.
It’s
refreshing to see a film about inner-city schools that breaks from the
mold established by To
Sir, With Love and carried on in such winners as Dangerous Minds.
The genre, if you could call it that, smacks of a condescending
naïveté that Half
Nelson acknowledges and addresses head-on.
Ryan Gosling plays Dan, a white, obviously, junior high school history
teacher (delivering university-level lectures on dialectics) in a
predominantly poor black school. He’s smart,
charming, great with the kids, even coaches the girl’s
basketball team – so what’s the catch?
He’s also a self-destructive disaster addicted to
crack-cocaine. The dramatic conflict is kicked-off when one
of his students/players catches him smoking it in the girl’s
locker room after a game. Gosling, in a career-defining
performance, plays this scene, as well as the entire film, with
startling brilliance; hopefully he will no longer have to make any more
Stays or Murder by Numberses.
In reality, there are no superheroic Poitier-types who’re
going to come along and “save” these
kids. Dan himself comes to realize that he hasn’t
the ability nor the moral authority to help or protect his students;
when broadened, this functions as social commentary on a central fault
of liberalism. People need to help each other – it
isn’t so one-sided. As Dan points out, Western
thought is deficient in its insistence on seeing the world as black or
white. In truth, it’s simultaneously both. -- Henry Stewart
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