Half Nelson

6.8 OVERALL	Smart . . . . . . . . 8.2 Sexy . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Funny . . . . . . . . 6

Starring: Ryan Gosling, Anthony Mackie Directed by: Ryan Fleck Runtime: 106 min. Rated: R Release date: August 11, 2006 - More Info

The Nerve Review

Early in Half Nelson, high-school history teacher Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) is quixotically attempting to explain dialectics to a room full of rambunctious teenagers. He asks the kids to shout out a few examples of opposing forces. Black and white, they offer. Short and tall. Fast and slow. Nobody comes up with "scrupulously naturalistic Sundance indie" and "terminally hokey Hollywood cliché-fest," but then I guess that brand of smug reflexivity fits into neither category.
If ever there were a film at war with itself, that film is Half Nelson — even the title, never explained, denotes a sweaty struggle for supremacy. Director Ryan Fleck and co-writer Anna Boden have fashioned what looks to be a laughably schematic exercise in bogus uplift, with Dunne as the ambitious white authority figure determined to improve the dangerous minds of smart but underprivileged "inner-city" youth. That Dunne is himself struggling with a raging crack habit and requires emotional support from Drey (Shareeka Epps), the most quiet and watchful of his charges, could come across as just a flippant reversal. So it's a something of a small miracle that Boden and Fleck manage to redeem this contrived scenario, simply by making every moment unemphatically credible.
It helps, of course, if you can cram your movie full of uncommonly gifted actors. Gosling has inspired nothing but raves since Half Nelson's Sundance premiere, all of them fully justified; without visible strain, he captures the volatile amalgam of self-righteousness and self-abasement that characterizes the defeated progressive. (The defining moment is Dunne's drunken lunge at a female colleague, who promptly locks herself in her bathroom, whereupon he pronounces judgment to the empty apartment: "That was weird.") But Epps, given her tender age, is almost equally impressive, turning Dre into a nucleus of wary stillness. And the film's finest performance arguably comes from Anthony Mackie (She Hate Me), playing a smooth-talking, blunt-yet-eloquent drug dealer who competes with Dunne for surrogate-dad honors — he'd fit comfortably amidst the disturbingly charismatic crew on The Wire. Collectively, and in concert with Fleck and Boden's stubborn integrity, these actors create a landscape that feels wholly believable, to the point where you can almost forget how ludicrous it seems. — Mike D'Angelo

Your Reviews

I was in a bar in DUMBO, Brooklyn last night and there was this alcoholic guy with a beard and a moustache, kind of Moses style, in there ranting and raving and mumbling and threatening to sue and then becoming docile in the way of those people who just act like a bar is their insane asuylum and the bartender is the humoring warden. He was so goddamn depressing, he looked like some old Russian intellectual but in DUMBO you know the guy is not Russian but from Peoria or something and faking it. The bartender was so coked up he was almost screaming everytime he talked and filled my drink up with ginger ale (the house red sucked and I had to turn a sangria to make it drinkable) so fast I couldn't see his hands move to the glass from the drink gun mount, it was that fast. "Let's all take our clothes off and FUCK EACHOTHER!" he said, "lets have an ORGY!" Of course it was just exactly this kind of mood and the full blast Moby playing on the speakers that kept the bearded guy going until 2am when they forced him into a car service, saying to all of the other people sitting in the bar "He's a 12th grade teacher! Just imagine, that guy is going to be teaching goddamn kids at 7:30 in the morning, in five hours!" I almost asked the guy, as he was courted to the lincoln, if he believed whether or not Bush lied to us by using weapons of mass destruction as a reason to start the war in the middle east. Because that was Ryan Gosling's excuse to smoke crack in the girls bathroom stall of the school he taught 8th grade in in the movie "Half Nelson."

Half Nelson was really entertaining, just like reading a James Frey book. But the part that kills you when the whole thing finishes and you're digesting it the next day is the premise for the pathology that we find so car-wreck-fascinating: Ryan Gosling, a cool, well meaning civil rights intellectual and record player owner (no, he doesn't like MP3s, okay?) has been driven to destroy himself with crack and completely comprimise the integrity of his leadership position as a teacher of sweet, gullible 8th graders in his class in a Brooklyn public school because of George Bush and the other republicans. "I went to see a movie," said my friend Niles, "and instead I get this fucking "message" shoved down my throat. If someone had advertised it as a political film I never would have gone to see it." What Niles was referring to specifically were these embarassing segements of "art film" within the narrative, random clips of the earnest students in Gosling's class giving oral presentations in front of old black and white projector reel clips of various civil liberties horrorshows for black people. I guess we are supposed to think that the war in the middle east is just another one and the president is like a Klu Klux Klan member or something. And that poor Ryan Gosling, the good man, a nostalgic with what the Irish call a long memory, is so tormented by our government that he has no choice but to smoke crack and destroy himself, corrupt his classroom, and most of all corrupt what he is "supposed" to become: a white leader.

If you can manage to watch the film without puking at this alleged social zeitgeist go for it, as I said its still damn entertaining.

posted by gigiryan on 9/6/2006 10:37:35 PM
nerve personals profile: gigiryan

I've heard great things.

posted by willdoig on 8/14/2006 11:58:00 AM

Does it really seem so ludicrous for a public school teacher to have a drug problem? The performances are fantastic, but I think the premise ain't bad either.