HALF NELSON

by Kevin Koehler

I resisted Half Nelson largely for the same reason I resist all idealistic white teacher in the ghetto films: the tiresome premise, the implied racism of an archetypical Caucasian savior, the do-gooder soapbox for white liberal guilt, the cynical appropriation of urban cultural trends. It’s all become so very boring and predictable, honestly – my eyelids droop just thinking about it.

In The Believer, Ryan Gosling played a Jewish skinhead and was truly remarkable. In Half Nelson, he plays a drug addict history teacher. As he did before, Gosling’s fashioned a very special performance that carries the picture on its back, saving it from its worst intentions. This makes two uniquely exceptional performances in five years. Gosling is twenty-six now. At this pace, we can expect roughly seventeen more of these from him before he turns seventy (and twenty-nine when he turns 100). That’s not too bad.

Dan Dunne is a history teacher at an inner-city junior high school. He’s gotten away from writing, which we sense is his true passion; he’d like to get back but life has gotten in the way. He also coaches the girls’ basketball team and smokes crack. One of his students, Drey (Shareeka Epps), catches him in a bathroom stall with his addiction in flagrante. The shared secret results in a growing bond between the two that manifests most prominently in rides home after practice and clashes with Drey’s other surrogate father, a local drug dealer named Frank (Anthony Mackie). Dunne also has some outstanding credit balances and unresolved issues with an ex-girlfriend who keeps leaving messages on his answering machine; he solves these problems as he does most of his others – with a pipe or a rolled-up dollar bill.

In the classroom, Dunne has veered off course from the district-mandated lesson plan, choosing instead to teach his African-American students the Civil Rights Movement through the (Marxist/Hegelian) prism of “dialectics.” He argues that change and progress occur through the collision of two opposable forces, resulting in innate (even desirable) contradiction and imperfection in the universe. Dunne is talking about history, but he could also be talking about himself (indeed, Dan and Drey form their own dialectic opposites, acting on each other for personal growth). “One thing doesn’t make a man” he tells Drey after she makes veiled reference to his habit; he’s not wrong. His difficulty with controlled substances has certainly done his personal life no favors, but he remains a dynamic, positive figure for the kids in class. One wonders if it is despite or because of his most visual flaw – although unspoken, Dunne’s strung-out demeanor largely echoes something his students see in their neighborhoods or even in their homes. They know, even if we don’t, that a man’s shortcomings and addictions do not condemn him.

The film is at its best when it allows Gosling to take control of it with manic, Method-y force. He’s electric, commanding our attention whenever he is on screen. Half Nelson is decidedly less effective when it moves from the personal to unsubtle polemic. Dunne’s struggle is often equated with that of his students (they are both in conflict against “the Machine”); it’s an embarrassing claim, frankly. Filmmaker Ryan Fleck just can’t help himself sometimes, undermining the delicate naturalism of his picture with filmic, archival-footage asides of Mario Savio and Augusto Pinochet among others (even Gosling can barely pull off wearing an American flag band-aid and discussing WMDs). Dunne’s students intermittently forced to address the camera by teacher and director alike (Fleck largely sees them as one in the same) to tell us historical dates and facts we simply have to know. We probably should know these things, granted, but we don’t need to for this film nor should we be learning them from it.

Interesting footnote: The pool of actors who can play inner-city students must be a shallow one. I counted no less than three students from Dunne’s classroom (Nathan Corbett, Tristan Wilds, Taylor King) that also figure prominently on HBO’s terrific fourth season of The Wire, set largely in an inner-city school as well.

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