Half Nelson (2006)

The relation between teacher & student has been the subject of far, far, far too many moralistic Hollywood movies. Is Half Nelson (directed by Ryan Fleck) one of them? Yeah, at least partly, even though the film deviates from the formula in some ways - most importantly, here it is the teacher, not the student, who is to be 'saved'. But still, the sentimentality of the teacher-student-genre is all-present, despite or perhaps because of Half Nelson's indie 'ruggedness'. The film's teacher is a troubled addict (a scruffy-looking Ryan Gosling) who tries to survive at work, where he teaches his kids in a self-styled free-wheeling way, ignoring the instructions in the ring-binder. Of course, he's a history teacher. This kind of teacher-student film won't work, I guess, if the teacher teaches geography or biology (my hunch). The study of a fucked-up teacher builds upon his relation to one of the student, a girl whose father is worthless, whose mother works all the time and whose brother is in jail - a self-reliant, tough girl. Their dynamic: she tries to save him from drugs and he tries to save her from the world of drug dealing. This is what the director preserves from the inspirational school genre: the saving project. This is admittedly a bumpy project. The people in the film are lonely, self-conscious people who don't want to be saved. Half Nelson approaches its subject with some grimy cinematography and slow pace - still, I cannot resist feeling that it is a sentimental film that thinks of itself as a bold rule-breaker. It gestures towards questions about class and race, but all this remains gestures, self-conscious gestures.