HALF NELSON (2006)
HALF NELSON
Ryan Fleck (US, 2006, 106 min)
Feature, Drama
Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) is a young inner-city junior high school teacher whose ideals wither and die in the face of reality. Day after day in his shabby Brooklyn classroom, he somehow finds the energy to inspire his 13 and 14-year-olds to examine everything from civil rights to the Civil War with a new enthusiasm. Rejecting the standard curriculum in favor of an edgier approach, Dan teaches his students how change works – on both a historical and personal scale. Though Dan is brilliant, dynamic, and in control in the classroom, he spends his time outside school on the edge of consciousness. His disappointments and disillusionment have led to a serious drug habit. He juggles his hangovers and his homework, keeping his lives separated, until one of his troubled students, Drey (Shareeka Epps), catches him getting high after school.
“In this cinematic season of vacuity and ineptitude, Half Nelson has to be seen. Made with assurance, restraint and psychological acuity by director Ryan Fleck and anchored by Ryan Gosling’s commanding performance, this paradigmatic American independent feature approaches recurring themes in a compelling new way. You can't ask more from a film than that.
Half Nelson’s success is all the more remarkable because it sounds so familiar. Charismatic teachers and the students they connect with, drug dealers and their desperate customers, the hard knock lives of inner-city young people raised by a single working parent: These are the building blocks of tepid urban dramas without number. What is different about Half Nelson is the execution, the kind of subtlety in writing, directing and acting (by costars Shareeka Epps and Anthony Mackie as well as Gosling) you seldom see. This is a film that is careful to be real, that fearlessly refuses to overdo potentially incendiary material and that, most telling of all, truly understands and cares about its people and the fragile friendships they attempt to form.
Like the wrestling hold it is named after, in which the body pulls back as the hand pushes forward, the characters in Half Nelson (co-written by Fleck and his producer Anna Boden) are whipsawed by opposing forces. They are all but incapable of movement while at the same time they sense that movement is essential for them to survive.
Though Dan (Gosling) and Drey (Epps) are teacher and student well apart in age, similar crises confront both. They find themselves at critical life junctures, looking for something to believe in and hold on to, something — it could be a relationship, it could be drugs, it could be a job or almost anything — to focus and center their lives.
That said, the remarkable thing about Half Nelson, a male-female drama that is not a romance, is that it is not reducible to formulas. The delicacy of its understanding of interpersonal dynamics means it concerns a pair of highly individual people interacting at a specific place and time.”
–Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times
Festivals: Sundance, San Francisco Film Festival (FIPRESCI Prize), SIFF (Audience Award) Austin Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Festival, Philadelphia Film Festival (jury Award), London film Festival, Lucarno Film Festival (Special Jury Prize).
www.halfnelsonthefilm.com
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