| CHALK OR CHEESE? : Ryan Fleck's 'Half Nelson' [7/10] |
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| Saturday, 16 June 2007 | |
   It isn't just the fact that its protagonist listens to his music via a hi-fi rather than an i-pod that gives Half Nelson such a heavy seventies vibe: the film splices together Karel Reisz's (still crazily underexposed and underrated) 1974 movie The Gambler with groundbreaking 1975-77 sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, though in the process dispensing with the Jewishness which was a shared characteristic of both those antecedents' protagonists. The Gambler starred James Caan as Axel Freed, a hip, tough-talking intellectual teaching literature (specialism: Dostoyevsky) at a Manhattan university, whose life becomes progressively derailed by his addiction to gambling. Freed's moral decay reaches a nadir when, under pressure from the bookies to whom he owes money, he asks one of his star students to throw a crucial college-basketball game. Welcome Back, Kotter presented slightly sunnier image of NYC in the mid-seventies, and featured Gabe Kaplan as Gabe Kotter, an idealistic high-school pedagogue whose maverick methods prove surprisingly successful with his class of semi-delinquent, multi-racial Brooklynites (among them a certain J.Travolta, enjoying his first major screen role.) In Half Nelson, the idealistic high-school pedagogue is Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), who teaches history - and coaches basketball - at a Brooklyn school whose pupils are predominantly African-American. Like Axel Freed, he finds himself in a downward spiral because of an addiction which he's powerless to resist: in Dan's case, he turns to crack cocaine as a means to escape his professional and personal problems. "Mr Dunne" (note how his full name gently hints at rapid downfall) quickly becomes so 'strung out' that he even starts indulging his habit on school premises - which is how he's discovered in flagrante delicto in the toilets by one of his more precocious pupils, 13-year-old Drey (Shareeka Epps.) This shared "secret" proves merely the first step in what turns into a firm friendship between the somewhat mismatched pair. Dan quickly becomes concerned that the intelligent, feisty Drey may be keeping inappropriate company in the form of drug-dealer Frank (Anthony Mackie), the former partner-in-crime of her currently-incarcerated brother. Dan, who has immersed himself in the literature of America's racial and social injustice, feels duty-bound to protect - in loco parentis - his youthful protege from the rough side of the "streets." But, as he'd be the first to point out, he's nobody's idea of a Travis Bickle... And Half Nelson - thankfully, given the circumstances - is no Taxi Driver, and nor is it any kind of To Sir With Love or Goodbye Mr Chips update. Scriptwriters Ryan Fleck (who also directs) and Anna Boden resist the numerous melodramatic avenues down which the story could easily have developed instead wisely concentrating on the interplay between the characters: between Dan and Drey, Dan and Frank, Drey and Frank. Mackie is very good in a particularly tricky role - and it's a shame that the big showdown scene between Frank and Dan, Drey's contrasting "father figures" (a truly edgy, volatile, but strangely funny encounter) should come to such an abrupt end just as it's starting to become genuinely surprising and engaging. But the film really revolves around Gosling and Epps, and they're both excellent in what amounts to co-lead roles (although the casting-director cheated somewhat by selecting Epps [15 during shooting] to play a girl who has only recently celebrated her 13th birthday.) Gosling even managed to nab an Oscar nomination as Best Actor, quite an achievement for what is a (relatively) low-budget, "indie" production. Not that there's anything shoestring about Half Nelson as a package: its limpid images are slickly shot, mainly using hand-held cameras, and snazzily scored (music by Broken Social Scene, plus an eclectic array of pop, rock and jazz tunes - the over-enigmatic title, as well as referring to a tricky wrestling hold, is apparently also a track by Miles Davis.) If anything, the technical aspects are rather too impressive: this is essentially quite gritty subject-matter, and there's the occasional sense that director Fleck (in collaboration with, among others, cinematographer Andrij Parekh and editor Boden) is guilty of "aestheticising up" what could perhaps instead have been an abrasively straightforward narrative. In addition, he punctuates the story with sequences in which Dan's pupils address the camera directly about various particular shameful incidents in recent American history (the assassination of Harvey Milk; the CIA's overthrow of Salvador Allende; the Attica prison riot and its violent cessation), which he then illustrates with contemporary TV-news footage. Though not without wit and interest, these interpolations cumulatively come across as a little gratuitous, repetitive and gimmicky. We're never quite in the stylised terrain of, say, Rian Johnson's hormone-infused blackboard-jungle fable Brick, but there are times when Fleck tiptoes rather perilously close to that kind of too-cool-for-school hipsterism. Perhaps he's taking his cue from Dan, a preeningly self-obsessed sort who exudes rangy muscularity and Details-magazine pin-up charisma even at his most tousled and drug-addled - and who, as his doe eyes photogenically brim with pain, at times seems intended to incarnate the entire anguished suffering of America's intellectual/liberal Left. It's to Gosling's credit, however, that Dan consistently registers as a character rather than a cipher, and Boden and Fleck also deserve praise for transcending what is essentially a fairly corny set-up - immature teacher is taught life-lessons by precociously sage pupil - to come up with something that feels quite fresh, bold and true. Neil Young 15th June, 2007 HALF NELSON : [7/10] : USA 2006 : Ryan FLECK : 106 mins (BBFC timing) seen at The Tyneside Cinema, Gateshead (UK), 14th June 2007 public show (paid £6.20) |
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