Half Nelson

What would you do, as a 13 year-old student, if you found your teacher smoking crack in the bathroom? What if you were the teacher? This is Half Nelson, a new film from first-time director Ryan Fleck starring the best young actor in the movie business, Ryan Gosling.
Gosling plays Dan Dunne, a junior high history teacher and basketball coach by day and an addict by night. Dunne is a good teacher and really cares for his students. Being a teacher myself, I can understand the pressures and struggles of the job. He grows close to one student, Drey (played by Shareeka Epps), and tries to be a good influence in her life. Drey's brother is in jail. Frank, her brother's partner in crime/drug dealing, takes an interest in Drey's life too. Drey needs a good male role model (her father is absent as well), and the crack-smoking teacher battles it out with the crack-dealing friend. Irony. Who should be in Drey's life? What kind of influence does a 13 year-old girl need?
Dunne's favorite subject to discuss in change. He has a theory that two opposites always exist, and that those forces push against each other. Yet, the opposing forces actually unite in a way. Example: the kids hate school, yet they still go. Also, Dunne says, history is a circle, not a timeline. (Movie watching tip: Theories discussed by characters in a film are usually about the themes of the film itself, though they may seem unrelated). Thus, opposites exist in the film (a crack smoking teacher who wants to be a good influence on a student and get her away from bad influences, like drugs and drug-dealers). "Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it," yet in this film it seems as if history will be repeated regarless of prior knowledge. Dunne is a walking contradiction. He is a bold idealist, yet doesn't live up to his own standards. He sincerely wants the best for his students, particularly Drey, yet cannot change his own life. Half Nelson is nothing if not honest. In a normal hollywood film the student and the teacher would come together and everyone would be changed for the better. Happy endings. But Fleck treats his subject with authenticity, not trying to inspire so much as trying to acknowledge the way people really work. You could see Dunne as a hypocrite (aren't we all). Or you could see him as a person representative of the opposing forces inside us all. We are all contradictions, aren't we? *spoiler warning* In the end, Drey does not bring about a change in Dunne's life, and there is no tidy resolution. Instead, she just sits with him in his brokenness. Drey actually goes further dow the road of destruction herself, becoming an errand girl for Frank and delivering drugs to customers (including Dunne). I did not like the ending because it seems like a shrugging off of responsibility, yet that is what happens more often than not. We tend to write ourselves off as failures and learn to live with it.
Half Nelson is filled with irony and paradox. Should we fight for change even though we know (or at least think) it is futile? Even for ourselves? It is a cop-out to say "this is who I am" if there is something in our lives that need to change. Shouldn't Dunne man up and take responsibility for his habit? Yet, to be honest, the change is very difficult and many people give up. So often the change does not happen. Without God, can change happen at all? I like to call the change redemption. Dunne does not have God, and maybe that is why he fails to find redemption. Yet did he find a shadow of redemption in the friendship of Drey? Will they help each other further down the road, or will they enable each other to slip further? Fleck's film is not sentimental. It does not give us pat answers or make us feel good about ourselves. Half Nelson does what all great films do, gives us more questions than answers.
Gosling should win Best Actor this year, but he won't. The performance is masterful and beautiful. And I hope Ryan Fleck makes more movies in the future; what a unique and gutsy first feature. It seethes with subtelty and depth.