| Product: |
Half Nelson (DVD) |
| Date: |
09.03.07 (203 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Gosling, the whole look of the film
Disadvantages: Hard watching at times
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 young girl, Dreya (Shareeka Epps). She is bright, intelligent and deserves far more than she is ever likely to get from life. She has no father and has to find her own way to and from school as her mother is always at work. She cycles the route to work, always being reminded of the ghetto like area she lives in, but occasionally gets a lift from the drug dealing friend of her brothers who is now in jail, having protected the so called ‘friend’.
Between them they both realise there is something in the other that can possibly help them survive the lives they are living. A friendship blossoms between them as they fathom out how far their friendship can go and how long it can last.
The question is how long can it last when the triple threat of drugs, alcohol and sex threatens to destroy them?
Half Nelson is a film that defies your expectations; it leads you one way and then reveals a different tangent. I can tell you now that your immediate thoughts on what the film is about will be wrong! It is a very powerful film and, like Keane, is a film about just trying to live and survive in a harsh unforgiving world. It reminds us that life isn’t as bad as it could be when you see how bad some people have it.
Even more amazing is that for a small independent Canadian film with a very low budget it doesn’t ever look or feel like one. The production values are terrific and you never ever get that feeling you often get with small budget films, you know the one where you notice that it isn’t looking as good as a Hollywood film.
Half Nelson was written by Ryan Fleck (who also directed it) & Anne Boden and came out of a short film they made in 2004 on the same subject. It took them two years to get the money together for the full-length version of their story even though the short was a big success. That they did is a testament to their faith in their story, and probably to wanting to do it their own way and not have to temper the story at a studios request.
The true asset of this film is Ryan Gosling, who was nominated for Best Actor award in this years Oscars for this film. He manages to evoke sympathy and disgust in equal measures for his character. His performance is outstanding and up there with Damian Lewis’ from Keane, and I didn’t think I would be saying that for a long time!
The best description I can make of his acting is that I really cannot imagine anyone else in the role, when someone manages to make themselves become the character they are playing and put their all into it the part becomes them, you forget they are acting for a few brief minutes.
Astoundingly Shakeera Epps was plucked not from any drama school or some such place but from ‘open casting’. She just turned up for a part in the film and blew the makers away so much that she walked away with the main one instead. She impressed them so much she played the part in both the short film and this full-length version. She plays Dreya as a girl with confidence in her abilities but a lack of faith in a system that is going to fail her because of her colour and where she lives. That you can feel this from just the way she acts and reacts is again something that shows how good she is, and how good the direction is to elicit such a performance from her.
I find Half Nelson a very difficult film to review, mainly because trying to tell you anything about the plot is likely to either reveal too much (because the film is very plot orientated and pretty much everything means something) or because it could give you the wrong idea of what it is all about and that would be just as disastrous.
Half Nelson is another of a recent rash of American Indie that can, at times, be very uncomfortable to watch but also manage to be so engrossing that you cannot take your eyes of the screen. Yes watching the daily struggle of Dunne will not make you laugh or brighten your spirits after a hard day at work but the disconnectedness he feels with reality when not teaching is something that we all have probably felt at some time in our lives, though not to such an extreme. Still when it comes down to it Half Nelson is a rare piece of movie quality, uncompromising in its attitude, and with Gosling is has a man who is surely and the first rungs of the ladder to stardom.
Half Nelson is released sometime this summer, not sure of the exact date as it has already been put back once, almost certainly only in Arts Cinemas and London.
I saw it at the London Film Festival Oct 2006.
Summary: A hard hitting look into the life of an inner city teacher
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