Ryan Fleck’s debut feature, co-written with his partner/producer/editor Anna Boden, evokes a time when the Weinstein brothers hit full stride in the mid-90s and Sundance was the only game in town. Half Nelson reminds us how cool the independent sector used to be – two first-timers expand a 2004 short into a kick-arse screenplay, land the services of a super actor (Gosling) and end up with a dozen awards and an Oscar nod for their lead. Huzzah.
More impressively, the film subverts the overly familiar tropes of such inner-city improvement schemes as Freedom Writers, Dangerous Minds and Music Of The Heart. Gosling, an actor who first came to attention as a Jewish Nazi in The Believer, is well qualified to convey the contradictions of an idealistic young high-school teacher with a crack habit.
By day, he’s a lefty intellectual valiantly ignoring the curriculum and teaching dialectics to deprived 13-year-olds. By night, he’s slumped over a pipe in a filthy apartment. Inevitably, his nocturnal habits spiral out of control, and in an extraordinary scene one of his pupils (the excellent Epps) finds him in an extremely compromised position. An unlikely friendship, appropriately scored by Broken Social Scene, soon blossoms.
Filmed in the same naturalistic fug as A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints, Half Nelson falls in with the current vogue for low key, Cassavetes inspired drama. But even by the arch standards of this milieu, Mr. Fleck’s film is distinguished by its thoughtfulness and smarts. By handing a little black girl moral authority over a white, middle-class male, we’re left with a whole series of paradoxes and subtle oppositions. Ha. The kids weren’t the only ones getting a lecture in dialectical theory.