HALF NELSON Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
THINKFilm
Grade: B-
Directed by: Ryan Fleck
Written by: Ryan Fleck, Anna
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Shareeka Epps, Anthony Mckie, Deborah
Rush, Jay O. Sanders, Nicole Vicus
Screened at: Broadway, NYC, 3/16/06
Opens: August 2006 Coincidentally, when I got home from a screening of Ryan Fleck’s leisurely-paced “Half Nelson,” I found this notice on Associated Press: “Being a middle school teacher is arguably one of the most challenging jobs on earth. Still, losing control with a student is never acceptable, and that's exactly what happened on Jan. 11 in Louisville, Ky., when a middle school teacher bit one her students--hard enough that the kid needed medical treatment for the bite wound. The boy wouldn't spit out a piece of candy. The Associated Press reports that teacher Caroline Kolb has not only been fired from her job, but also charged with aggravated assault for biting Garrick Hudson, 14, on his back during the classroom scuffle.” From my 32 years’ experience teaching high school I can verify that teaching kids, particularly those from the so-called inner city, is stressful. The stories I hear from the middle school colleagues can be particularly frightening, which is why a friend once told me that the hippest teachers are in the 7th and 8th grades, where the youngsters, who are years away from the college track, would seem to have little incentive to get along with the instructors. That’s why it’s good to see how a genuinely popular fellow has such good rapport with his eighth-graders that he can get away with the frowned-upon practice of lecturing most of the time, allowing the kids to give only one- or two-word answers to his queries. What’s more his lectures seem well over the heads of his constituents. He spends lesson after lesson discussing the Hegelian dialectic–how opposites clash, leading to a new and higher truth: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Like other teachers nowadays in New York and presumably other big city public schools, he is casually dressed, informal in all but his subject matter, and opposed to the rigid curriculum imposed by New York City. He takes chances that no one in his right mind would take. He has a pet student whom he drives home and wants to protect from drug peddler, Frank (Anthony Mackie), who uses her as a clocker. Far worse, he is a heavy drug user who is caught one day by this student toking up in the girls’ room! Huh? Why there? Why not in the teachers’ rest room or at home? Then it wouldn’t be a story. “Half Nelson” is a minor movie, one which but for one factor could be shown on cable, but that one factor is what makes the whole thing worth while to see: it features Ryan Gosling as the inner-city teacher. The 25-year-old Canadian-born Gosling, who gained a wide audience from his schmaltzy romantic role as Noah Calhoun in Nick Cassavetes’s “The Notebook,” has a more powerful role this time around as Dan Dunne–who seems to have only one class, coaches girls’ basketball, and seems never to need to brush up or create lesson plans or to correct papers as he’s regularly out all night drinking and drugging. Aside from his questionable practice of driving a 13-year-old girl, Drey (Shareeka Epps) home most days and his self-destructive habit of taking hard drugs, he dates a teacher in the school, Isabel (Monique Gabriela Curnen) and in one scene tries to force himself on her. Not wise. Yet you can’t help liking the handsome young teacher for his idealism, for actually communicating with his charges. It’s always the best teachers, isn’t it, who like to ignore the curriculum guides, to chat informally with the youngsters in their classes, to be hip (unlike one burned-out fellow in the teachers’ lunch room who reads sensational news clippings from a tabloid rag). “Half Nelson,” which is the name of a hip-hop song and can hardly be connected to the subject matter in this movie, is filmed by Andrij Parekh in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene section–which looks more like a working-class community in Staten Island. And Anna Boden, as editor, does a crack job (no pun intended) cutting from the drug scene to the schoolroom. While young Shareeka Epps interprets her role as a 13-yar-old going on twenty, she plays the pic with a blank expression throughout, even when she catches her main man smoking dope in the girls’ room. But Ryan Gosling, not surprisingly, could be up for citations in the press as perhaps the most charismatic actor of his generation. Thankfully the soundtrack is not at all hyped but consists largely of some background guitar strums. Rated R. 106 minutes © 2006 by Harvey Karten
harveycritic@cs.com Member: NY Film Critics Online | 
