Half Nelson
I confess to having had a certain disinterest when I first became aware of this film. “Oh, the guy from The Notebook is going to play a teacher on crack? Yawn!” And then the aforementioned guy, Ryan Gosling, was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance. Obviously, I would need to check this out.
Ryan’s crack teacher role Dan Dunne is a complex one, and he gives us a rich portrait of a man falling privately prey to his addiction. What the movie does not satisfactorily explain is how an erudite, passionate teacher with hobbies and sports (he’s also the girl’s basketball coach) let something as high maintenance and hard core as crack cocaine into his life. He lives in squalor, he can barely get it together for work, and then he’s the kind of teacher everyone wishes they had. He loves dialectics (opposing forces creating change) and is a vocal proponent of critical thinking over rote memorization. The guy’s a role model – why was he ever stupid enough to get hooked on this drug? Why is he so isolated?
These questions were never answered for me, but I did very much enjoy his perforance as well as his supporting actress Shareeka Epps as Andrea/Drey, one of his students who becomes privy to his secret, creating an awful and strange intimacy and dependence between them. She rises above her textbook at-risk life, and she has her own reasons for keeping Dunne’s secret. He also has his reasons (empirically) for wanting her to escape the life he now embraces. The plot ebbs and flows with his ability to pass as functional.
Half Nelson demands a lot of suspension of disbelief (such as the entire world lacking a sense of smell, apparently), and leaves a lot of ideas dangling, unformed, ready to be taken in hand. An hour and ten minutes in I genuinely wondered where this movie was going. Despite that, Gosling is rightfully recognized for the delicate balance he brings to Dunne’s life. He is inspired and inspiring when he’s straight, and yet is sucked back into the hole so easily. The irony of his academic love of duality cannot be lost on him. He craves intellectual connection in class and even when he’s high. Every time he crawls back out of his hole, he looks as though he has left something behind permanently. Painfully, he also never seems to lose awareness of what he’s doing – he’s resigned and ashamed and scared and seduced nonetheless, spiraling inward to a transformation he is powerless to resist. What defines this character, his “real” life or his addiction? Gosling has a glorious physicality to Dunne, with twitches and instinctive, minute withdrawals from all situations, embodying his thoughts when the scripts words fail him. It is indeed a worthy performance in a film that only needed a couple of tweaks to match his contribution.
MPAA Rating R-pervasive drug content, language, sexuality
Release date 8/11/06
Time in minutes 104
Director Ryan Fleck
Studio ThinkFilm
