Half Nelson

Half Nelson, the first feature by director Ryan Fleck, steers clear of the inspiring clichés of teacher-student films and the usual violence of films set in the ghetto.

Half Nelson is a character study, with a meager plot stretched into a one-act film. Not to say this is a bad thing. If one wishes to be thoroughly entertained, steer clear of this film. If one wishes to have a comfortable time at the movies, steer clear of this film. However, if one wishes to view a unique and risky example of independent cinema, see this film.

Any viewer can tell how much blood and sweat went into making Half Nelson, which was shot on 16mm for less than $1 million. Ryan Gosling is truly admirable for seeing something in this screenplay. After breaking viewers' hearts in The Notebook, Gosling carries this film. Gosling plays Dan Dunne, a Brooklyn middle-school teacher who is addicted to crack cocaine, with admirable subtlety. It's a performance that will make the audience cringe with anguish and sympathy as Gosling takes one self-destructive step after another.

It isn't surprising to hear that Half Nelson was once a short film by Fleck titled Gowanus, Brooklyn. That film starred the young actress Shareeka Epps as a bright, tough African-American girl named Drey in Dunne's class. The film characterized her unlikely friendship with Dunne, after she discovered his crack habit. Epps reprises her role in Half Nelson, and is astonishingly good in her feature debut, giving a real, down-to-earth performance. Rounding out the main cast is the charismatic Anthony Mackie as Frank, a local drug dealer who is actually nice.

Anna Boden's screenplay, co-written by Fleck, is filled with ranges of intensity, awkwardness, sadness, and humor. Fleck veers from the norm in his direction, giving an extremely claustrophobic look into the lives of the characters.

Half Nelson, although somewhat painful to watch, will stay with you for a long time.

Ryan Gosling delivers a performance in HALF NELSON that is a marvel to watch and to see the talent which this young man/actor brings to the film and screen. Every frame delivers the intensity and drama within this young teacher's life and the issues he handles with his addiction and how he strives to reach his students in the classroom through honesty, humor and the lessons of history delivered on screen.

Just watching Gosling in every frame is a triumph in what character development is all about, along with the brilliance of his performance. Gosling adds HALF NELSON to his outstanding work in the films THE UNITED STATES OF LELAND and the gorgeous NOTEBOOK.

Shareeka Epps as a young, struggling student, is a perfect foil to Gosling, and her intelligence and strength matches that of Gosling as they both deliver scenes that are memorable and tremendous. From the classroom to the basketball court, to the painful addiction scenes, Epps and Gosling make HALF NELSON come alive with anger, pain and the true pathos of life represented in America today.

With the final scene in the film, one can only hope that the characters may move from despair into lives which might give them a sense of hope, and finally a chance, as with the lessons of history, to move beyond their unhappy past into a brighter and more rewarding future.

Two knockout performances dominate this uncompromising and emotionally visceral indie. Directed and co-written by first-time feature director Ryan Fleck, this 2006 drama pulls no punches and offers no cheap sentiment in the story of two people intractably bonded by their mutually desultory existences - Dan Dunne, a crack-addicted Brooklyn middle school history teacher, and Drey, a 13-year old student in his class burdened by an overworked mother, a brother in prison, and an insinuating drug dealer named Frank. Fleck and co-writer Anna Boden establish Dan's gifts as a teacher almost immediately as the character engages his class with natural ease. It becomes clear that this is not going to be a fish-out-of-water story but a more complex study of a man caught between his passion for teaching and his hopeless need for the next fix.

Dan's self-defeating effort to separate the duality in his life is what provides the impetus of the plot, as there are no simple explanations offered for his drug-addled life until we catch a glimpse of his emotionally disconnected family later on. Much like what Vera Farmiga achieved in "Down to the Bone", Ryan Gosling dissects his character with textured precision and conviction. He honestly earns our attention and even our compassion despite the selfishness Dan displays at times. Matching Gosling all the way is novice Shareeka Epps, who plays Drey with almost unnerving steadiness. She affectingly conveys the self-protective insulation her character has against a world too ready to use her.

Together Gosling and Epps remarkably achieve an unexpected symbiosis that makes Dan's and Drey's ongoing struggles palpable. The supporting cast is uniformly strong with effective turns by Anthony Mackie, who shows surprising depth in what could have been a stock villain role as Frank, and by Karen Chilton etching the regret and exhaustion in Drey's mother in just a few brief scenes. Even though the film was done on a miniscule budget, it doesn't feel cheap with particularly strong work found in Andrij Parekh's intentionally bleached-out cinematography. The 2007 DVD offers a nice, unassuming commentary track by Fleck and Boden, but the rest of the extras are not very interesting - a gag reel, three understandably deleted scenes and four extended scenes that really don't add much more insight. However, the film itself is exceptional work.

Set in Brooklyn, New York where he currently lives, Ryan Fleck's first full-length feature, Half Nelson, is a gritty, sensitive, and emotionally harrowing film that meticulously avoids the inspirational clichés of many teacher-student films and the obligatory violence of films set in the ghetto. The title is derived from a wrestling move in which you turn an attacker's strength back on him. In the case of Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), an idealistic eight-grade history teacher in an inner city school, he turns the attack on himself, inspiring his students by day and drugging himself at night with crack cocaine.

Dan is a well-liked teacher and basketball coach whose parents (Deborah Rush and Jay O. Sanders) were liberal activists during the 60s and 70s, participating in protests against the Vietnam War but have now substituted alcoholism for political passion. Like his parents, he wants to make an impact on the world but is disillusioned with the current political climate and, out of frustration and fatigue, (like many on the Left today) has drifted into a self-induced stupor. Believing in social justice and that society can be changed through education, he teaches history, to the chagrin of the school's administrator, in the form of Hegelian dialectic, showing that change results from a clash of opposites.

Dan shows his students videos of seminal events from the last fifty years such as the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that paved the way for desegregation of the schools, clips from the civil rights movement, and Mario Savio speaking on the Berkeley campus during the Free Speech Movement. To its credit, the events in the film do not occur in a political vacuum but attempts to tie in the failed protests of the Left to Dan's drug habit are not entirely persuasive. Dunne's life begins to spiral out of control when one of his students, thirteen-year old Drey (Shareeka Epps), discovers him in the girl's bathroom passed out from ingesting cocaine. Instead of becoming frightened or angry, Drey brings him water and helps him to gradually come down from his high.

Drey comes from a family in which her mother works a double shift and is rarely at home, her father is out of town, and her older brother is in prison for selling drugs, but she is mature and street-wise beyond her age. She promises to keep his secret and both find that their unlikely friendship satisfies an emotional need that Drey cannot find with her classmates and Dan cannot find with other adults. He is dating a fellow teacher (Monique Curnen) but his behavior with her is erratic and his political speeches and drug habits soon turn her off. A former girl friend from his period of rehabilitation (which he said didn't work for him) tells him that she is now getting married which pushes him further into a downward trajectory.

The emotional highlight of the film is a confrontation between Dunne and Frank (Anthony Mackie), a suave drug dealer and associate of Drey's older brother who recruits Drey to be his collector. While Dan wants to steer Drey in the right direction, he is hardly a role model and the results, while promising, are inconclusive. Although the premise of the film is somewhat implausible, Gosling's performance of the charming but flawed teacher is completely credible, so nuanced and touching that we root for him in spite of his capacity for self-destruction. Shareeka Epps is equally convincing in her powerfully understated performance as his tough but sensitive young friend. Co-written by Anna Boden and supported by an outstanding original score by Broken Social Scene, Half Nelson "stands and delivers" one of the finest films of the year.

Ryan Gosling is truly amazing in his film role deliveries. His breakthrough role in "The Believer" 2001 was explosively intense. He consistently gives integral reflective portrayals, even for a departure romantic role in director Nick Cassavetes' "The Notebook" 2004, he was absolutely convincing as Noah who loves Rachel McAdam's Allie to the core. Here in "Half Nelson," he appears to disappear into Dan Dunne, a high school teacher with an ideal and a crack addiction problem. That sure sounds contradictory in terms: a teacher being a role model, while drug addiction a totally unacceptable behavior. As Dunne wrote on the blackboard in the beginning: 'Dialectics,' the film "Half Nelson" is in itself dialectics demonstrated.

Gosling's Mr. Dunne the history 'teach' doubling also as basketball coach, meeting (a solid matching delivery from) Shareeka Epps' Drey, the 13-year old student who 'found' him and 'witnessed' his secret - theirs is a relationship, naturally portrayed, of two 'opposing' forces as dialectics as can be. I felt Drey is the primary force that 'helped' Dunne's secondary force to yield and together, they created a contradiction anew as life goes on.

I remember from a 1969 book, a quote that might describe the heart of "Half Nelson": "Contradictions are the source of all movement and of all life. All things are in themselves contradictory and it is this principle, more than any other, which expresses the essence of things."

In a way, contradictory yet similar: Dunne and Drey both are 'on their own' trying to hang on, to manage the conflicts in their life's journey. Do we need all the answers in life? Do we have to know why someone behave as he/she does or something happen as it did? Director Ryan Fleck and co-writer/editor/producer Anna Boden tried not to 'over-explain anything'. Sometimes the answer can simply be: "I don't know."

"Half Nelson" is an ambitious film. Besides 'comments' on educational system, single parent family strife, Dan's addiction predicament, the script also managed to include political viewpoints unobtrusively expressed through talking heads of single student reciting historical civil rights movement events. The 'R' rating does indicate some intimate scenes, clever inter-cuts juxtaposing what the two forces were each doing at the moment. Music (by "Broken-Social-Scene") is timely applied at certain segments but sparingly. Well-rounded supporting cast, especially Anthony Mackie as Frank the 'friendly' dealer who may want to do right by Drey but only in the way he knows how within the realms of selling drugs (reminds me of w-d Boaz Yakin's "Fresh" 1994, brilliant debut performance by Sean Nelson as the 12-year old interacting with a dealer 'mentor').

Kudos to all involved on "Half Nelson". The film was shot in Brooklyn, New York. Thanks to ThinkFilm for being the distributor (documentary: Spellbound; Murderball; March of the Penguins; drama: The Last Kiss - Italy; Kontroll - Hungary; Gus Van Sant's Gerry).