Half Nelson

Half Nelson is a difficult movie to classify beyond simply calling it a Drama. Personally I like to refer to it as a ghost movie as we follow its half-dead hero through the halls of public schools and the streets of the Bronx looking for his next fix of validation or drugs. What starts out looking like your standard movie about a teacher inspiring a group of inner city youths quickly changes once you realize that said educator is a crack-head. Yup, when Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) is not teaching History or coaching the girl’s basketball team he is either out doing lines with girls he picks up or worse, he is slumped over somewhere unsanitary with a crack pipe in his hand. The first time we find him in this sad state he has snuck into the girl’s locker after hours looking for a private place to smoke up. His student Drey (Shareeka Epps) discovers him hiding in a stall when she uses the restroom waiting for her father to pick her up. This starts an interesting dynamic between the characters, for not only does she now know his most unflattering side, but in giving her a ride home he becomes a substitute father figure and unfathomably bad role model. The plot takes odd turns and twists, seeming much more anecdotic than linear. I enjoy films like this, but early on you start to feel that there is no way to end this type of movie, you inevitably keep waiting for another episode to start up.

The cast is great, comprised mostly of TV actors populating the worlds of Dan and Drey. The world of Dan is both great and frustrating; he comes from a well off middle class white family with activist aspirations and a propensity for addiction. His fellow teachers are cynical but perfectly grounded, and Dan cannot relate to how well they handle the crushing burden of both their profession and the world around them. Drey on the other hand is the daughter of a paramedic who seems to do double and triple shifts constantly, she is sympathetic and wise whenever present but gone the rest of the time. Her father is pretty much non-existent and her brother is in jail for dealing drugs. The only constant in her life is an altruistic drug dealer who looks after her family since it’s his fault that her brother is in jail. Plenty of awkward and sublime moments fill in the rest of the films running time and when it concludes I was left hungry, neither for a resolution nor an epilogue, but just to spend another half hour with these characters. All in all a great success and I am glad to see Ryan Goslings efforts nominated for an Oscar, while the academy loves prosthetics and  silly accents this is a good bare bones portrayal with no crutches nor gimmicks to fall back on.