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If only every junior high school instructor could be as hip as Brooklyn history teacher Dan Dunn (Ryan Gosling). Tall and thin with fashionably disheveled hair, piercing blue eyes, and only in his mid-twenties, he has an engaging and breezy banter with his classes, comprised entirely of black and Latino students. (This is the highly segregated New York public school system). But it’s only a matter of time until he self-destructs. As if being mentally unfocused with blood oozing out his nose and nearly dozing off in front of a class weren’t enough clues, he sneaks in the girls’ bathroom after a basketball game to smoke some crack, where he is caught by one of his students – the shy Drey (Shareeka Epps), a 13-year-old black girl living with her single mom. Her deadbeat dad is nowhere in sight.
If, according to Dan, “History is the study of change over time,” then Dan’s life has flatlined. His days are made up of vignettes: hooking up at bars; drinking Johnny Walker alone in his rundown apartment; slouching on his coach listening to Latin jazz. He is nothing but self-aware, having unsuccessfully tried “the rehab thing,” and telling a cheating student second chances are rare; you got to take advantage of them. He’s very much like another recent strung-out junkie, Clean’s Maggie Cheung, playing a washed-up rock celebrity taking one step forward, then several more back. It’s how others respond to the drug addict that makes both films compelling. In Clean, father-in-law Nick Nolte is the possible lifesaver. But in Half Nelson, there’s no lifeboat, just a teenaged girl. It’s her choices, like Nolte’s, that drive the film.
This is at least the third film out of this year’s Sundance centering on a teenage girl’s coming of age, and the most quietly observed and convincing. Quinceañera’s Emily Rios, Twelve and Holding’s Zoë Weizenbaum, and Half Nelson’s Epps all turn in understated performances, but director Ryan Fleck repeatedly holds many of Epps’ close-ups up to scrutiny for every crystal clear thought, whether Drey’s experiencing a puppy dog-crush on Dan (almost like an inverted To Sir, With Love) or seeing him as a father figure in competition with her neighborhood’s slick drug dealer (Anthony Mack). Both men are masterful manipulators and could charm the pants off anyone. (And doesn’t it seem like yesterday that Gosling was just a teenager himself?)
A smooth talker, Dan rationalizes there are some changes you can’t control, but there are others you can. Meanwhile, his
drug habit has the winning hand. After a one-night stand, he bemoans, while high as a kite, a static he quotes – 75% of
Americans still believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. His state of puzzlement, if not helplessness, has an
offbeat counterpart in another recent American indie, which, on the surface, couldn’t be more different from this hand-held film shot
on digital video. The family in the sardonic road trip film Little Miss Sunshine also muddles through life. Like Dan, they
return again to step one (there’s even a heroin sniffing grandpa). However, the tone of Half Nelson is bittersweet to the
much more hopeful Sunshine, with the former's title even referring to a wrestling term for an immobilizing hold. After a decade of Tarantino’s film geek swagger, is befuddlement the new vibe?
Kent Turner
August 11, 2006
