Review of “Half Nelson”
We get so used to watching slick films from the Hollywood dream factory that it’s great to be reminded that there are other American stories to tell, and other ways to tell an American story. Half Nelson is an independent film that premiered with great acclaim at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and has gone on to win the hearts of most American film critics. It’s contemporary social realism built around a very restrained script and brought carefully to life with two beautifully poised performances –very un-Hollywood.
Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) is an idealistic teacher trying to counter the mainstream view of history in his classroom of 13 year olds. He’s meant to be teaching by the book but is happier exploring the politics of his subject: how change happens in society, and who controls the way things are. But what has increasing control over his own life is his drug addiction, something he barely keeps from intruding into his work, until he is found - severely compromised - by Drey (Shareeka Epps), one of his students. Street-smart, and cautiously exploring her own understanding of the adult world she is in the process of entering, Drey befriends Dan, and it is their fragile and unlikely relationship in the seedy drug-ridden underbelly of Brooklyn that the film deals with.
Writers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have produced a rare and beautifully understated screenplay, based on a short film they made in 2004. Exchanges are filled with subtlety and a realistic attention to the art of holding back. All the characters seem burdened with reality in Dan and Drey’s world: Dan’s fellow teachers and family, Drey’s over-worked mother, and the local drug dealer Frank (Anthony Mackie) who knows both of them for different reasons. The Brooklyn we are shown is not a pretty place, and the story is simple on the surface yet propelled by the infinite complexities of human nature underneath.
Ryan Fleck also directed the film and has chosen to tell us the story in a semi-conscious haze of grimy handheld photography, as if an extension of Dan’s mind. The screen is filled with the intensity of the human form, often in close up, often out of focus, and always in a dirty yellow-brown palette. This will no doubt make it hard going for some, but the honesty of the relationship between the two main characters and the superb performances from Gosling and Epps more than compensate.
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