Educating Ryan.
The "inspirational inner-city schoolteacher" subgenre of movies gets schooled in this indie film whose report card included a Best Actor Oscar nomination for Ryan Gosling's A+ performance.
Caveat lector: This entire topic about teaching hits a little too close to home, so you might be getting more review/essay than you care to read. If so, just skim or skip.
Let's be honest here: the subgenre absolutely exists, and it does so with what are now definitely recognizable parameters and expectations. Just think of such examples of the category as "Chalkboard Jungle" (1955), "To Sir with Love" (1967), "Stand and Deliver" (1988), and "Dangerous Minds" (1995). Fundamentally, you have a troubled school full of troubled students from depressed socio-economic backgrounds, and then you have a heroic teacher who swoops in to make a difference in the lives of those kids.
(By the way, I'm talking specifically about inner-city school movies, so I'm purposefully excluding other teacher-centered movies like "Dead Poets Society" (1989), "Mr. Holland's Opus" (1995), "The Emperor's Club" (2002), or "Mona Lisa Smile" (2003). Just as there's an inner-city schoolteacher subgenre, there's a prep school/elite campus version. We're not even going to get into the high school/college sports teams and coaches subgenre; just go watch "Hoosiers" (1986) and "Remember the Titans" (2000), OK?)
In the middle of all this is the teacher. He (or she, but it's almost overwhelmingly he) has foibles and doubts and difficulties, but they're all subsumed in the greater idea and ideal of helping his students. He's marked by his passion, dedication, tirelessness, and almost superhuman personal conviction and sacrificial impulse. He's like the pelican of medieval legend. He's an inspirational figure because of the Greater Heroic/Messianic Purpose of Reaching These Needy Troubled Students. Now this idea was recently subverted for laughs in 2011's "Bad Teacher" with Cameron Diaz, but the idea remains the bedrock of this subgenre.
I've gotten pretty cynical about movies lately, and I'm kind of jaded, especially about teacher movies because I teach. It takes a lot to surprise me, and a lot more to impress me. This was also why I initially didn't want to see "Half Nelson." I knew the subgenre. I didn't want yet another (by now) predictable, cliched, often emotionally manipulative tale of the saintly teacher and the urban renewal project in flesh-and-blood form otherwise known as the students. But the reviews so insistently and consistently praised this movie that a few days ago I streamed it on Netflix for some background noise while I was grading papers. It only took about five minutes before I forgot all about the papers and was glued to the TV.
This movie is absolutely riveting, and it's largely because of the astonishing performance by Ryan Gosling. Remember how a while back I, thoroughly turned off by the vomit-inducing maudlin romantic sap surrounding 2004's "The Notebook," basically said that I didn't see what the big friggin' deal was about Gosling? I take it back. I take it all back. All those reviews of "Half Nelson" that began to hail him as the one of the best actors of his generation? I had dismissed the laurels as so much overheated hyperbole. But ... They were absolutely onto something. The chameleon-like Canadian (who was everywhere in 2011 with "Drive," "The Ides of March," and "Crazy Stupid Love") proves himself a character actor of the first caliber.
Gosling turns in a stunningly realized character study of Dan Dunne, the teacher at the center of the story. An instructor who also coaches the girls' basketball team at his inner-city school in Brooklyn, he clearly wants to help his students, and the initial scenes of Dunne in the classroom show a man who indeed shares a rapport with them:
Don't be expecting Mr. Keating-like moments of jumping on desks and quoting Walt Whitman, though: Dunne's a history teacher. Pay attention to his initial lecture; he presents history ("the study of change over time!") with dialectics and the idea of opposite forces in contention that bring about turning points. In fact, he's quite insistent about this. Honestly, the first time I saw this, I wasn't buying this. I was being a history buff and pedant, but then it finally dawned on me that the idea of opposite, struggling forces is really not about the history, even if Dunne thinks it is. In a sublime deployment of irony, he preaches this in the classroom but cannot see the same principle at work in his own life, for there are two vastly different sides to him. At school Dunne is teacher and coach, but in his off hours he is as desperately in need of help as any of his students. The inspirational teacher himself has a drug problem bordering on full-blown addiction, along with the distressing habit of going out and getting wasted at night.
The very idea is repulsive, isn't it? Get that crackhead away from my kids! Yet there is something in Gosling's powerfully magnetic depiction of quiet, gnawing despair that keeps you from recoiling completely. He comes across as being so very flawed and so very heartbreakingly human that it almost physically aches to watch even as you can't take your eyes off him. (And NO, this is not about eye candy, because there is nothing beautiful about a man in meltdown.) As we see him avoiding creditors' phone calls in his dilapidated apartment or barely pulling himself together to go to school, Gosling's scruffy, lanky, unkempt teacher becomes more a figure to be pitied than hated in his obvious isolation and inability to connect with other people, including his own family. Dunne is imploding, and his self-loathing, self-destructive after-hours degradations begin to leak into his working life. Things swiftly worsen when Dunne's former girlfriend reappears to announce her engagement and her own successful drug rehab. In the wake of her visit, Dunne slips ... and is discovered strung out on crack in the school's locker room ... by one of his own students.
From there the movie really starts as it focuses on the complex, shifting relationship between Dunne and 13-year-old Drey (played by the remarkable Shareeka Epps), who herself is at a crossroads. A latch-key kid with an older brother in prison, a deadbeat absentee father, and a caring mother who nevertheless must always be away working, Drey finds herself tempted by older neighbor Frank (Anthony Mackie) to go into the drug business. Meanwhile Dunne desperately wants to keep her from falling into the drug world -- a protective wish that silently nods to his own ruinous problem and becomes the ultimate expression of "Do as I say, not as I do" not as a mark of hypocrisy but as a warning. But the fact remains too that Drey needs a role model, no matter how flawed, to help her navigate her dangerous world, and Dunne needs someone to help, even in (especially in?) his own weakness, to keep him from collapsing utterly ... and Drey helps him in return. In the dialectics of life, they are both facing their own turning points.
The story veers dramatically from the familiar cliche of heroic teacher/student disciple and becomes instead a deeply affecting meditation on connection and isolation, along with the touching idea that flawed broken people can still help each other -- and that in so doing, even in weakness and pain, there is relief and redemption -- that the shiny cliche of the Heroic Teacher is, here at least, not enough -- that there are no easy, pat solutions, but that there is still hope to be had. And that is an entirely different kind of heroism.
Mad Minerva gives this movie an A. I counted off for the students' frequent unrealistic potted "explanations" of various historical events and for a brief flash of a tired old leftist trope that instantly dated the flick. Still, Gosling's Oscar-nominated performance steamrollers over such minor quibbles. (Frankly, I thought he was better than Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland" -- the actual Oscar winner -- but nobody asked me.)
"Rotten Tomatoes" gives "Half Nelson" a certainly Fresh rating of 90%.
"Half Nelson" runs for 106 minutes and is rated R for rampant drug use, some strong language, and some (depressingly joyless) sexuality.
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