Half Nelson (2006)

not exactly goodbye mr chips

A sad story of a man teacher on a spiral down
who finds a very unlikely friend.
We begin to think drugs have this fellow in a full Nelson,
but there is some redemption in the twinkie defense...
The cheater who sits behind also steals Drey bike,
but she finds it and gets it back. We don't know if things will get
better, but we have some hope. April 27, 2008

Turned it off after a half-hour

My husband and I are in our 40s and not hard of hearing, but we couldn't understand a word that Shareeka Epps said. The rest of the movie seemed to be nothing more then Ryan Gosling getting wasted, trying to sleep it off, and dragging through the rest of his workday. Talk about overrated! April 9, 2008

Just so so

This was interesting since I too am a teacher, but I sure don't smoke crack all night long. Ryan Gosling is up for Actor in a Leading role, and I am afraid to say that his nomination may be his reward. This isn't because I don't want him to win, because he was good. The best I've ever seen him, but he's up against DiCaprio and Whitaker (and a few others who won't win.)

Gosling plays David Dunne a crack smoking history teacher/basketball coach who wants to write a children's book on dialectics, but instead he smokes too much crack and tries to screw a colleague. His ex is getting married and his parents wish he'd visit more often.

His beard bothered me, since it was all scraggily until the end. Shareeka Epps, his student, befriends him, and she does a fine job. This is her second role, a role she reprised from the short film of the same story line she did two years ago. She has a chance to be good, and she shows it in an understated muted role in this film where she attempts to juggle education and drug dealing on the inner city streets.

This film was good, but I felt it was slow. Forty-five minutes in felt like an hour fifteen. Early in the film Gosling tells another character that he's a teacher to touch just one life. To change just one person, but it's his character who needs touched, needs to be saved, and, by the end, Epps does just that. Nice ending. April 3, 2008

Painful and beautiful all at the same time

I am sort of a Ryan Gosling fan but I had not gotten around to seeing Half Nelson for some reason. I think that I am often reticent to watch movies that are so dark because they can effect me more than I would like.

I am, however, glad that I was able to get over that and watch this film. It was rough. I have never had the urge to do cocaine or smoke crack but this movie would have killed even the slightest curiosity for me. After watching this, I realized that drugs are glamorized more than I had been aware of because few movies were as uncomfortable to watch as this one. Candy might be the only other one that comes to mind right now and even there the love story softened some of the hard edges that were left all over Half Nelson.

In addition to the discomfort imparted by Dan's drug use, there was an uneasiness I felt about his relationship with Drey. The tension was perfectly done. The possibility of the friendship between them becoming something unacceptably inappropriate was an undercurrent that kept it from feeling saccharine. This was my favorite aspect of this film and I think that both Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps did a fantastic job at maintaining that tension.

The movie had some really funny moments, too, which I appreciated. I think that Ryan Gosling was just amazing. He managed to do some pretty despicable things and be a pretty pathetic character without alienating the audience. When he does something positive, he is so conflicted that it seems believable and genuine.

Really, just a great film. I think that Gosling creates Dan and gives him life and the rest of the cast of the film create the world that he lives in very convincingly.

March 28, 2008

The convergence of strength and weakness

In an interesting self-penned piece on the making of this film that appeared in IFC (the Independent Film Channel magazine) in 2006, director Ryan Fleck talks about the film's title, mentioning that half-nelson is a wrestling position that gives the grappler upon whom that position is imposed some hope for escape. This is the concept Fleck wanted to convey in this film, and he's done that, for sure.

As schoolteacher Dan Dunne, Ryan Gosling is superb, playing a young man who simultaneously challenges his inner city history students with concepts no other teacher would even dare think of (Hegel's dialectics), yet at the same time addicted to freebase crack cocaine. When one of his students, Drey (Shareeka Epps), discovers his addiction, an unusual relationship develops between the two, made all the more powerful by the fact that Drey is not your usual inner city student, but really smart--both intellectually and streetwise.

In many movies, it would be the male lead that carries the film; thus, in Half Nelson, the viewer is initially expecting that Gosling will be the primary focus and shoulder the burden of insuring that the scenes are as strong as they can be. But that's not the case here. While Gosling is indeed extremely good in his role, newcomer Shareeka Epps is brilliant, just as strong if not stronger than Gosling in screen presence, and carrying way more than her share of the responsibility for this being a four-star movie.

The third wheel is Anthony Mackie who plays a friendly drug dealer in the movie's setting, south central Los Angeles, and while he's also very good, it's really Epps and Gosling who drive Half Nelson. Mackie's character helps out Drey because Drey's brother is in jail and is a good friend of the drug dealer. Ironically, Drey's mother is a security guard.

Schoolteacher Dunne more than recognizes the irony of him teaching dialectics, one of whose central concepts is the synthesis of opposites, to a class of kids who are subjected to the temptations of weakness every day. The irony, of course, is that Dunne himself is a convergence of strength and weakness--great teacher and also drug addict. And, as we see, Drey herself embodies this convergence as well, although not to the same extent that Dan does. She's a tough kid, but also recognizes the good in people. She knows Dan is good, but at the same time sees his weakness. She herself knows what good is, but at the same time engages in behavior that she ultimately sees as bad.

This is a superior film, a riveting character study in which the two leads know exactly who their characters are--know exactly what, in fact, the complexities of those characters are--and play them brilliantly.

Highly recommended. February 4, 2008

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