Half Nelson is that rarest of marvels - an American fiction film that wears its political heart on its sleeve. It's a small film with a long view, and its story hinges on an unusually nuanced relationship between a white man and a black girl, each of whom has landed in harm's way. The delicacy of its lead performances (more on them later) and its sense of everyday texture are each worthy of praise. But what makes Half Nelson both an unusual and an exceptional American film, particularly at a time when even films about Sept. 11 are professed to have no politics, is its insistence on political consciousness as a moral imperative.
The poet W.S. Di Piero once described the work of the Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia as "inquiries into the impossibility of justice and the terminal intellectual fatigue caused by disillusionment." From his haunted eyes, it looks as if Dan Dunne, the young idealist Ryan Gosling plays in Half Nelson, is suffering from that same terminal fatigue. A junior high school history teacher, Dan lives with his cat in an apartment filled with books, pages from an unfinished project and furniture that looks dragged in off the street. It's the kind of apartment that the poor hold onto until they can't hold on any longer, the kind of dump that cops break into so they can pull out the dead, which makes it the perfect home for a death wish.
Dan wants to save one child at a time, like 13-year-old Drey (the newcomer Shareeka Epps), but he's committing suicide one crack vial at a time. He's plagued by such contradictions, some inherited, others self-generated, teaching in a part of Brooklyn that still looks like Brooklyn, trying to do good in the very neighborhood where he buys his drugs. (The film was shot, among other areas, in Gowanus.) The people here are mostly black and brown, and in a film not as mindful of race and representation, the whole thing might come off as sanctimonious or worse. This is dangerous ground for Dan, as well as for the film's gifted young director, Ryan Fleck, and his writing (and life) partner, Anna Boden.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF CIMAGE
But Fleck and Boden are smart cookies, and they have figured out how to short-circuit the expectations of an audience weaned on Hollywood pieties. If Half Nelson had four times the budget and half the brains it could easily be cinematic Valium, a palliative about a white teacher who, through pluck and dedication, inspires his nonwhite students to victory, in the classroom or on a sports field, if not necessarily the larger world. But Half Nelson is something of a beautiful bummer, steeped in such melancholy and painful truths that there are moments when it's almost a surprise that it doesn't come with subtitles. This isn't a pleasure-free zone, but the film earns its glimmers of happiness, and there are glimmers, with honesty.
Much of Half Nelson involves the tentative, messy relationship that develops between Dan and Drey after she discovers him nearly passed out in a school bathroom stall, a crack pipe still in his hand. The discovery gives her power that she doesn't use. Instead of turning him in, this gruff, lonely child makes him a point of curiosity, first spying on him from the school playground and then tightening the circle, coming closer and closer. Soon, Dan is giving her rides home and warning her away from Frank (an excellent Anthony Mackie), the charming midlevel dealer who already has his hooks in her older brother. Dan and Frank each play big brother to Drey, adding layers of self-interested advice to her moral education.
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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