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In Dead
Poets’ Society, teacher John Keating (Robin Williams) is the romantic-heroic
rebel who inspires his scions of ruling-class wealth to throw off the shackles of noblesse
oblige. In Educating
Rita, professor Dr. Frank Bryant (Michael Caine), cynical and alcoholic, is
restored momentarily to life when challenged by Rita (Julie Walters), a bright,
working-class self-starter and good-looker, in a kind of Pygmalion set in the
classroom. What Half Nelson, written by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden and directed by
Fleck, has most in common with these antecedents is an unwavering faith in transformative
change through education.
In the age of a politically numbed out America, where the machinery of
power relentlessly dumbs down the public and erodes public education, Half Nelson
offers a sensible, wise, charming, cunning, sobering object lesson in what is going on in
the world--both how people actually live their lives and why change must be embraced and
not merely endured. Think Film Company’s new release tackles thorny philosophical
questions head-on, confidently demonstrating that complicated philosophy is within the
reach of everyone.
Idealistic, white, middle-class Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) is a
seventh-grade history teacher at a mostly Black public school in contemporary Brooklyn. He
coaches girls’ basketball after-hours. He has a serious and growing drug addiction
problem. He also happens to believe that understanding history is important,
life-alteringly important, and that even most thirteen-year-olds can grasp and appreciate
Hegelian dialectics.
Indeed, director Fleck lays bare the principle of dialectical change by
incorporating directly into the plot Dunne’s classroom lectures, slightly paraphrased
from Fleck’s own father’s web site (the senior Fleck is a "dialectics
autodidact") on Hegel and the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. Lest this
be mistaken for preachy theorizing, the plot structure itself embodies some of the very
dialectical tensions shaping American society today. Dan Dunne is not just white and
middle-class, but the child of Nixon-era anti-war activist parents, who have resigned
themselves, drifting into alcoholism and cynical disillusionment with American politics.
Dan himself is unable to rise above the tension between his faith in
democratic egalitarianism and his own lack of faith in himself (he is a drug rehab
drop-out). As he acts out his romantic-heroic rebellion against authority and its public
school-mandated history curriculum, he drifts into the infantilizing fog of addiction. It
becomes difficult to say at what point principled protest becomes reactive acting out, the
(self) oppressed merely lashing out impotently against authority. In the midst of his
private despair, Dunne befriends one of his students, bright, thoughtful, vulnerable,
thirteen-year-old Drey (Shareeka Epps). Drey’s mother is a member of the working
poor, an EMS attendant. Drey has a brother in prison. And her father figure, Frank
(Anthony Mackie), is drawing her professionally into his world of drug dealing. Seeking an
alternative father figure, Drew is at first powerfully drawn to Dunne, her teacher and
coach. But she soon becomes caught between attraction and repulsion as she witnesses
Dunne’s addiction and becomes pulled closer into his addict’s life against her
will.
Rather than sinking into sentimental cliches, both Dan’s and
Drey’s characters are intelligently drawn. Realistic emotion, quirky wit, penetrating
political insight, and frequent improvised acting provide for dynamic performances from
both Gosling and Epps, who play off each other as naturals. Each character in this film
and each narrative thread manifests the dialectics of change, whether Hegel’s
historical dialectic or Marx’s economic dialectic. Rather than moralizing about
systemic or individual failures, Half Nelson asks the viewer to consider
America’s history anew, and try again. Philosophically sound, dramatically absorbing,
highly entertaining and highly instructive, Half Nelson is hands down one of the
best films of the year.
- Les Wright
