Half Nelson: Movie & DVD Review (2007)

(Originally published 2007)

Ryan Fleck's "Half Nelson" features Best Actor nominee Ryan Gosling in what fittingly is his best performance to date.

While it's unlikely that he will win the award--it's shaping up to be Forest Whitaker's year--Gosling nevertheless creates a disturbing, convincing portrait of a troubled man wrestling with an addiction to drugs that threatens to ruin him. That his character, Dan Dunne, happens to be an admired history teacher and popular girls basketball coach only heightens his problems, not to mention to the movie's moral complications.

Set in Brooklyn, this subtle, character-driven movie follows Dunne just as he's wavering on the cusp of addiction's full pull. The movie showcases the duality inherent in his life. We see him in class, a good teacher charismatically connecting with his students, and then in squalor at home, which has all the trappings of a drug den.

One night, after basketball practice, Dunne is so desperate to get high that he slips into one of the school's bathroom stalls, huffs on a crack pipe and becomes nearly comatose. Enter Drey (Shareeka Epps), the 13-year-old girl who catches him in the act with a disappointment that's palpable--she is, after all, one of his students. Still, instead of turning him in, Drey cares for Dunne, easing him onto the floor and staying with him until his high clears.

From this, their uneasy relationship is born, with Fleck's film focusing on two people in a state of transition. For fatherless Drey, who is being courted by the local drug dealer (Anthony Mackie) to become his new drug runner (a position that landed her older brother in jail), Dunne represents all that she might become if life has its way with her. For Dunne, life already has unraveled, though you sense through his tenuous connection with Drey that each might find a way to survive.

Not that anyone should expect it. "Half Nelson" isn't a feel-good movie. After dragging you through the hell of its characters' lives, it doesn't use them or their undesirable situations to lift you up--it's too honest for that.

Beyond the performances, which are uniformly strong (Epps should have joined 10-year-old Abigail Breslin in being nominated for Best Supporting Actress--she’s that good), what makes this movie so emotionally satisfying is that it isn't interested in offering canned satisfaction. Unlike so many movies that involve the relationships between teachers and their students, “Nelson” isn't manufactured to offer audiences an inspirational cheer at the end. If anything, whatever shred of hope it presents hangs in the balance. The movie refuses to pander.

Grade: A-