Into the Mire—A Review of “Half Nelson”
Craig Livermore
Half Nelson could only very uneasily take a place in the cannon of inspirational urban education movies. It is thankfully obvious that the creators of this gritty, raw, and, I would say, real, story of collective brokenness, race, and education set out with no desire to join any inspirational genre. Well-done inspirational movies can serve a very important purpose. Akeelah and the Bee, for example, although subject to some criticism for its occasional flight from the real to the phantasmic, is in all a sweetly written and well acted movie whose up-beat message gives sufficient ode to the cultural challenges faced by any student seeking intellectual excellence in an urban environment.
Half Nelson, however, realizes that such inspiration can be quickly lost after we dry our eyes and walk outside to face the messiness of reality. Half Nelson reminds us that for every American Dream, there is an engulfing culture of nightmare in which many are living. This movie deftly stops short of giving any solution or moralistic road maps, but I cannot help but to speak a lesson which I think naturally flows from its artistic manifestation. This admittedly projected message is as follows: First, those of us (and we all should be) who are concerned with the urban educational environment, should seek to understand the depths of brokenness in the culture that we all share. Second, growth, development and transformation will never occur in large measure in our youth, until we are courageous enough to face our own demons and imperfections, and thus open ourselves to the type of growth that can only be revealed through existential struggle.
It was easy to miss during this February’s Oscar celebrations that Ryan Gosling was nominated for the “Actor in a Leading Role” award for his work in Half Nelson as Dan Dunne, a white, crack-addicted middle school teacher in a mostly black school in Brooklyn . Gosling walked down the red carpet very much in the shadow of the other nominees—Leondardo DiCaprio, Peter O’Toole, Will Smith, and Forest Whitaker, the eventual winner. But Gosling’s skill in showing us the simultaneous existence of falleness and virtuous intent is matched only by the ability of his co-star Shareeka Epps (Drey) to reveal the marriage of sweetness and potential with a painful emptiness looking for answers in all the wrong places, which is so natural for an adolescent living in a broken world.
If we cannot get past, or more properly ingest, Dan Dunne’s drug addiction, then we should just turn the DVD player off. There is certainly the danger in this movie that we can too easily write off its relevance—“How awful that a drug addict is teaching in a middle school. If there is such a situation out there, that teacher should be fired, end of story.” But Gosling’s Dan Dunne is difficult to simply ignore. He is a formerly idealistic (if increasingly cynical) urban educator with a caring heart desperately trying to continue on in the face of a barely functioning private and professional life. He is, I would submit, very human. But because of the brokenness in his life, his good intentions become unhealthily manifest. This is a danger that threatens all of us, if we are not sufficiently mindful.
It is thus that Mr. Dunne begins to form a friendship with Drey, one of his middle school students. It is one of the triumphs of Half Nelson, and Shareeka Epps, that the character Drey, which could so easily devolve into cliché and caricature, lives on the screen as powerfully real. Drey faces the all-too-familiar psycho-developmental obstacles—an absentee father; an overworked mother; an older brother in jail; and a drug dealer offering to become family. The ongoing absurd paradox of the movie is the battle between the drug addicted teacher and the drug dealer (Anthony Mackie) to fill the void of father figure/brother figure in Drey’s life. The script is wonderfully woven with deft subtlety around this theme. It reveals a basic goodness in both potential mentors, while making it clear that Drey will follow a path of tribulations no matter which she chooses.
The development of the relationship between Drey and “Coach Dunne,” (He also serves as Drey’s basketball coach) is particularly perspicacious. It reveals not only that contemporary educators are often called to fill the pschyo-social needs in the lives of their students, but poignantly grants an informative whiff of the extreme dangers of transference and counter-transference based upon over-attachment between student and teacher. Although no improper physical sexuality occurs between Coach and Drey, it is clear that boundaries are crossed as Coach cannot face his loneliness and Drey unconsciously reveals the intense vulnerability of adolescence facing sexual discovery. In one scene, Drey is visiting the apartment of her teacher while helping him prepare for the evening’s date with another teacher. With obvious sexual overtones and imagery, Drey is asked to kneed the tomatoes with bare hands for the pasta sauce and offers jokes to be used during the date. In one important sense, Half Nelson can be seen as an important reminder for educators to be mindful of their own personal issues so that appropriate boundaries with students remain clear.
Perhaps the most powerful scene in the film occurs when Dan Dunne visits his suburban family. The painful brokenness in their lives is as every bit apparent, with as much desperate but futile attempt at palliation by chemical substance and deleterious distraction, as it is in the lives of Dunne’s students in the city. In spite of his ex-hippy history, Dunne’s father offers a pathetic attempt to distinguish and distance himself from the “urban jungle.” With a drunken slur he attempts a moment of father-son bonding doomed from the beginning because of the unwillingness to face emotional reality: “Teach me some Eubonics . . .” He says to his son. “Is that what they got you teaching in that zoo?” In this dysfunctional family reunion it becomes not only evident where lies the origin of Dunne’s proclivity for idealism and substance abuse, but it also is shown to us the uselessness of creating disconnection within culture that is shared across any feigned boundaries we attempt to create.
In the penultimate scene, Drey visits Dunne in the seventh circle of hell, as she walks in on his involvement in an orgiastic crack-addicted party. In a sense, Drey is the only possible hero of this story, perhaps making the point without triteness that our youth are our only hope. Because Drey looks into the eyes of Dunne’s depravity and self-loathing, and does not flinch. She is there the next morning, as he makes an attempt to clean up and make another try at life. Half Nelson is simply gorgeous, however, in its unwillingness to offer false hope. In many ways, false hope is much more dangerous than hopelessness can ever be. So, in the final scene, there is no way the viewer can say: “Well now, everything will be all right.” We know that Dan Dunne is still a crack addict. We know that Drey’s only other male role model and protector is a drug dealer. And, we can be fairly sure that were the sequel to be made in a few years, Drey will most likely be even more entrenched in a web of difficult life situations. But Half Nelson also forces us to confront the fact that real hope can only come with radical individual and cultural transformation both in cities, the suburbs and beyond. Half Nelson asks us to eschew outward judgment and focus on inward introspection. It forces us to confront the fact that until adults are willing embark upon a painful path of the openness which leads to growth, our youth will not have the opportunity to grow, heal, and fully manifest the greatness which lies within their being.
Well said!
Such as the Valley of the lilies, fresh and clean, refreshing reading