'Half Nelson' finds an engaging teacher locked in drug and alcohol abuse

By Arthur Salm
ARTS WRITER

September 7, 2006

Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) is the history teacher you always wanted in middle school: funny, intense, committed, not only willing but also downright eager to spin lessons off into long, involved, fascinating but ultimately related tangents.

That's not how we first see him, however, in Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's moving, jangly film “Half Nelson.” He's in his underwear and in a daze, sitting on the floor of his semi-crummy apartment, bathed in the soft light of either dusk or dawn. An alarm clock goes off: dawn.

Dan's had a hard night, but then, most of them are. He's a druggie, although not a particularly discriminating one; cocaine, alcohol, even crack will do. It's crack, as it turns out, that gets him small-time busted – by Drey (Shareeka Epps), his most promising student, who catches him with pipe in hand.

MOVIE REVIEW “Half Nelson” Rated R; Opens tomorrow

But “Half Nelson” is too smart a film to plod along the rutted trail of the standard drug flick. Dan, of course, claims to have his problem under control, and the truth is, he almost does; somehow he manages to get to class every day and summon enough verve to do his job and do it well. (“The kids keep me focused,” he explains.) Fellow teacher and occasional girlfriend Isabel (Monique Gabriela Curnen) tolerates Dan's mercurial attentions, but only up to a certain point, after which it's so long, pal. The dealer Frank (Anthony Mackie), friend to Drey's family, isn't a heavy but a lighthearted, basically centered fellow pursuing his version of an inner-city capitalist dream. An idealist to his shaky core, Dan is consumed with the notion of dialectic – the struggle between and ultimate reconciliation of opposites, or, at least, opposing forces. It is the touchstone of the history lessons he imparts to his (at least partially understanding) students, and of his life as well. A committed if mostly bystanding leftie, he perceives himself as ineffectual and not especially worthy of happiness; hence the broken love affairs, the solitary existence ... the drugs.

It's to the filmmakers' credit that none of this – not even the students' brief oral reports on significant contemporary events on the world stage, from the CIA-engineered assassination of Salvador Allende to the Twinkie-engineered assassination of Harvey Milk – comes across as either overly strident or lazily half-baked. If sometimes it doesn't quite gel, it doesn't have to: Everything within the movie turns on the budding friendship of the slowly sinking Dan and the remarkable Drey, coolly appraising onrushing adulthood and, from the look of her, ready for it.

Their scenes together have a soft electric hum; nothing sexual, to be sure, yet at the same time something deep and telling and true. In his car together – he gives her a lot of lifts home after basketball practice – they settle into their seats and seem almost to exhale in unison. It's nothing a whole lot more complicated than that they feel comfortable in each others' presence. They're friends at a time when each of them needs one.

Not that the film makes this out to be a universal panacea, or even the answer to anyone's overarching problems. But it's student and teacher, adult and child, man and very young woman coming together in a touching reconciliation that would do any dialectician proud.

  

 A Thinkfilm and Hunting Lanes Film release. Director: Ryan Fleck. Writers: Ryan Fleck, Anna Boden. Cast: Ryan Gosling, Shareeka Epps, Anthony Mackie, Monique Gabriela Curnen. Running time: 1 hr., 47 min.

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