For most of the film, Epps holds her face as still as a mask, only occasionally easing into smiles as bright as sunflowers, and then mostly in the company of her hard-working mother (Karen Chilton). It's a lovely, discreet performance that derives its power from restraint, a long, steady base line that, by virtue of its steadiness, gives Gosling the freedom to riff every which way up and down the expressive scale. Pretty, if not distractingly so, the actor has long girlish lashes, and the lines of his face are so delicate they might have been drawn in ink. It's easy for him to look sensitive, but he can play nasty, too, as he proved in his breakout performance as a neo-Nazi in The Believer.
Gosling dazzles even brighter in Half Nelson as a character with a more complex take on race than the one provided by a rampaging skinhead. That complexity rises up wonderfully in the scene when Dan storms up to Frank's house, jaw jutting, with the notion of telling the dealer off. You expect fireworks, maybe a gun or left hook. But it doesn't go down like that because Frank is a dealer and Dan, after all, is an addict who, like all addicts, always takes more than he gives. It's the same in the classroom. He teaches black kids about Salvador Allende and probably has a couple of dog-eared Frantz Fanon books next to his copy of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks.
Early in Half Nelson, Fleck slips in a black-and-white news clip from 1964 of Mario Savio, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leader of the Free Speech Movement, declaiming in front of Sproul Hall, the administration building that had become a flashpoint and battleground. "There is a time," says Savio, voice quavering with brilliant passion, "when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop."
That time Savio spoke of passed, at least for the left. Half Nelson is a lament for the radical fires of the 1960s, but its makers are too utopian, and commercially savvy, to suggest all is lost. If Savio were alive (he died in 1996), he would be roughly the same age as Dan's parents, whom we meet over a dinner filled with loud talk and too many uncorked bottles. Just before he leaves, Dan tells his mother that she and his father "stopped the war." She tells him, "That's nice, honey," and smiles one of her blurry smiles, blasted on booze and that long hangover she has been nursing since 1968. Like her, Dan has learned to self-medicate. What he needs to do now is kick the habit of disillusionment, and it looks as if he might.
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