PLOT: A 13-year-old inner-city girl discovers that the teacher she has a special connection with is secretly a drug addict. Coming to terms with this news impacts on both their lives.
One hallmark of a great acting performance is when it leads you away from the predictable response.
Case in point: Half Nelson, Ryan Fleck's compelling feature directorial debut about a drug-addicted teacher and the 13-year-old girl with whom he shares a rapport.
Almost everything about the featured relationship, on the face of it, is appallingly inappropriate.
And the key scene, in which 13-year-old Drea (Shareeka Epps) stumbles on her teacher/basketball coach doing crack in the girls' locker room after the game, is enough to make you want to squirm out of your skin.
And yet, the stunning, almost-wordless dramatic dance between Canadian boy Ryan Gosling and newbie actor Epps (no relation to Omar) eventually overpowers everything that's wrong about their relationship.
Theirs is a real rapport, a friendship based on respect, and minus any hint of sexual impropriety. The streetwise Drea knows what she's seeing, and wrestles with concern, uncluttered by shock.
In Half Nelson, Gosling plays Dan Dunne, a history teacher/coach who's a student favourite -- charismatic, funny and disrespectful of the curriculum (he teaches history colourfully using the "dialectic" theories of Georg Hegel, to the consternation of the principal). He's also a druggie whose party-hard after-work lifestyle has started to take over in the day (though when we meet him, he's brilliant at covering it up).
Meanwhile, his surliest student, Drea, has troubles of her own -- a brother in jail on drug charges, and crack-dealer/family friend named Frank (Anthony Mackie) as her male role model.
But there's something about the chemistry between these two. There's a great, wordless scene at practice where she frowningly refuses to get off the bench. Whistle in hand, he contorts his face into an exaggerated scowl that makes her beam in spite of herself. Fleck's handling of the scene is almost poetic.
As she discovers that the only "clean" male in her life is just as messed up as anybody in the 'hood, the viewer is inclined to worry that she'll fall to the lure of drugs, too. Instead, we see her grow up by degrees in the face of reality.
Interestingly, Half Nelson began as an award-winning short film entirely from Drea's perspective.
Having bumped it up to a feature, Fleck hasn't done as effective a job fleshing out Dan. We get bits and pieces of him -- a family of failed social activists who've become social drunks, an inability to connect intimately, his strange passion for Hegelian philosophy.
It doesn't add up to a complete picture, though Gosling works wonders with what he has.
BOTTOM LINE: See it for the stunning dramatic dance between Canadian boy Ryan Gosling and newbie actor Shareeka Epps, an almost wordless connection that rings true to the characters' scandalous but rock-solid friendship. In the end, she is more of a fully fleshed-out character than he is, and a mess of themes is left unresolved.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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