Half Nelson (DVD)

As we all know, the white-collar classes love to speak out through the media and in public against drugs and alcohol, but quietly take a truck load of everything in their own homes, young black kids in the ghettos paying the ultimate price for this hypocrisy with a bullet in the back of their heads. Half-Nelson dips into that class conscious contradiction on drugs and crime and how middle class ideals on things illicit often get confused. Unlike 'Freedom Writers', the other ghetto school kid struggle film from last year, this one concentrates on the moral conflict of a white teachers need to pull kids away from temptations whilst the black parents live off those ...

Basic Plot ------------- A drug-using teacher forms an unlikely friendship with one of his young pupils after she finds out his secret. When I first heard about this film, I envisaged it as a cross between One Eight Seven, Dangerous Minds and Dead Poets Society, with perhaps a little Leon thrown in. You know the kind of thing: inspirational, yet flawed mentor figure overcomes their fears/prejudices to inspire their charges to fulfil their potential. In fact, there is none of that in Half Nelson. It’s very much its own film, a one-off. Freed from the shackles of the Hollywood Studio System, it can go where, and do what it likes. And it makes the most ...

Half Nelson is a film of tremendous power, not only through the story but the powerhouse performance of Ryan gosling as Dan Dunne, a teacher at an inner city school. His life isn’t perfect, in fact it isn’t even great, but he is a teacher that goes against the grain, who wants to get the kids excited and interested in what he has to teach them as opposed to doing things the way he is told to. The problems he has with his work though are eclipsed by the struggles he has when not in school. His private life is tormented by an addiction to drugs, alcohol and a spiralling descent into the darkness that can envelop you at any moment. In his class there is a ...