Half Nelson Review

[This review originally posted in our forum by ScreenAnarchy regular Mike Rot, from whence I have copied it and moved it here so that the 'front-page-only' set may admire it as much as I do.]

If there was any semblance of justice in the determination of what becomes iconic in the popular imagination, the portrait of Daniel Dunne near the end of ‘Half-Nelson’ with his straggly beard, dark sunglasses and American flag motif band-aid on his lower lip would carry as much weight as say, Nicholson’s ‘Chinatown’ or DeNiro’s ‘Taxi Driver’. There is something immediately iconic in this image, as a piece of celluloid, but also as a symbol of American decadence. T-shirts need to be made.

Daniel Dunne (played by Ryan Gosling) is a crack-addicted junior high school history teacher, but as he himself says in the film, it’s more complicated than that. The same could be said for one of his students, the stoic-faced inner-city youth, Drey (played by Shareeka Epps) who gets by in need of a father figure before she stumbles across her teacher’s terrible secret. They begin an unconventional alliance in what turns out to be an incredibly sensitive and humane depiction of friendship in dire circumstances.

In lesser hands, ‘Half-Nelson’ would have been a throwaway curiosity, a minor work fusing the melodramatic effects of two well-trod genres: drug abuse redemption and against-all-odds pedagogy. What makes it that much more extraordinary is its restraint and quality of execution in the face of these easily accessible temptations to cut and run with the story. All too often the conventions of genre are used to fill in the gaps of an uninspired script, and this film could have very easily compromised… Dunne could have became a twitchy idiosyncratic caricature of an addict who learns the errors of his ways from the angelic student who has the wherewithal to pierce his protective shell, and who inevitably dies or become deathly ill so as to resonate the highest degree of pathos in the final climax… ‘I thought I was the teacher, when really… it was you’…roll credits. I am happy to say that creators Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden do not let this sort of compromise occur, and the film ends bravely with no easy answers.

There are so many pitfalls of the genre-material being mined here and the director shows an adept awareness of all of them, always cutting a scene before it stepped into that familiar territory. Where some choose to overtly glorify or denigrate the act of drug use, there is the right degree of restraint in Fleck’s depiction: Dunne is a sad man who fights his demons with a private loathing while he struggles to hold onto the only thing of value he has left in his life, the welfare of his students, but even this is only half-hearted and paradoxically held in his stupor. The drug taking is not emphatic, but it is not sidelined either, it exists alongside his spiritual, emotional, physical collapse which hangs over him even when sober. Glimmers of the motivations for the collapse are suggested in his brief encounters with family members and an ex-girlfriend, and the audience is left to fill in the gaps themselves. Even the obligatory scene of the anti-establishment teacher inciting inspiration in the minds of his pupils is slyly cut short, the film never having the patience to do with what is expected of it. In keeping with the fragmentary headspace of Dunne who delves back and forth between classroom lessons and nights of debauchery, the scenes are spliced as incomplete pieces, mere glimpses of reality in keeping with an unstable mind.

‘Half-Nelson’ is what I like to think of as a ‘mature’ drama – a drama of people not caricatures – one that explores a world of authentic human intimacy (or lack thereof). Much of the dialogue feels unscripted, and it is the raw charisma of the characters (and by extension the actors) which prevent this dialogue from becoming stale despite its lack of direction. Much of the drama in this film is left not to the dialogue but to physiognomy, the sly looks and pent-up emotion simmering behind blank stares; it is a wonderfully operatic study of human intimacy. Take particular note of the scenes between Dunne and his ex-girlfriend, so little is said with words but it is as if the entire history of these two people were made readily apparent by what one can read just by their body language and facial expressions.

It, of course, does not need to be said that Ryan Gosling has done a phenomenal job as the lead character of the film, in fact no sufficient hyperbolic praise could give proper justice to the man. But here goes: Gosling’s Daniel Dunne is up there with Brando’s Terry Malloy in ‘On The Waterfront’, a tired comparison but an apt one. There is so much to digest in every frame he is onscreen, and when paired with Epps it is doubly bountiful, I could have easily spent four hours watching them, and that sort of praise from me comes very rarely.

Incidentally, I take issue with what traditionally constitutes as ‘good acting’ by the Academy, their penchant for rewarding those performances that draw the most attention to themselves. This is most often the case when actors take on biographical roles, like Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator. Now, I love Cate Blanchett (and I mean love) but that performance was more a good impression than good acting. The mark of good acting should be the less one is inclined to think of the actor performing and the more one is inclined to think of the character being portrayed; a good actor should be invisible. Ryan Gosling’s restraint as Daniel Dunne needs to be factored in, as he made him a fully-dimensional character, a man of many contradictions, none of them overshadowed by acting bravado.

There is not a single thing wrong with this film, again a rarity. It is the right story, the right way to tell the story, the right performances, the right editing, the right musical choices, the right set direction, the right directing, not since, I think ‘In The Bedroom’ have I seen such a perfectly made American independent film. It is low-budget, intimate character study done well. I am not sure why local reviewers have been limiting their praise to three stars, I am not sure what else could have been done to push the envelope in its favor.

Review by Mike Rot.