Half Nelson (2006)

 Half Nelson

Ryan Fleck

USA

The story of drug abuse in the inner city of America has been told many times over. We are all familiar with the story of the minority family struggling to get by, with the promise of the American Dream just out of reach. Destitute inhabitants, knowing their fates lie in either selling drugs, or abusing them. After the conclusion of David Simon’s masterpiece HBO original series The Wire, it’s nearly impossible not to measure all stories of the like against his raw portrait of Baltimore, Maryland. David Simon’s Baltimore personified the daily struggle in modern America. However, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s story of Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), a middle-aged junkie schoolteacher in Brooklyn New York, offers a fresh take on the genre.

As most stories of the like deal with kids and their temptations with drugs, it is Dan who struggles with addiction. The film takes us through Dan’s daily life as a middle-school history teacher in Brooklyn, New York. He lives alone in a quaint apartment with his cat. But it quickly becomes obvious that Dan’s addictions have caused him to live this isolated life. Dan’s former girlfriend, who has battled addiction as well, briefly comes back into his life; only to disclose she has beaten addiction and has found love in someone else. Dan’s visit with his family reveals they are overtly clueless to their son’s drug abuse, as they flounder about in a suburban-whitewashed haze.

Within each of these encounters, Dan tries to reach out for help but doesn’t know how to get it, and therefore doesn’t receive any in return. Dan is perpetually stuck in a cycle of addiction, and doesn’t know how to break out. In spite of these failures, he finds help in an unlikely source; a young student named Drey.

Dan’s relationship with Drey develops in the classroom and in the gym, where Dan coaches the girls basketball team. Dan takes a liking to Drey, as she is clearly a standout in Dan’s classroom. But their friendship takes an unexpected turn when Drey comes across her coach, smoking crack in the locker room. As Dan trips on his high, Drey stays with him until he comes down. Drey keeps the secret between the two of them, as she deals with the other side of drug addiction. Drey’s brother is in jail for dealing, and the man he worked for has taken Drey in as a younger sister, hoping one day she will sling drugs like her older brother.

On the surface, Dan and Drey’s friendship is an unlikely one. A relationship between a teacher and student, each from the opposite sides of the tracks, is not to be expected. But they gravitate toward each other, simply because they need one another. The relationship between the two of them is where the film and the actors truly shine. While Ryan Fleck’s film offers a different perspective on the American inner city tale, it still offers the same ideologies of compassion and redemption. “Second chances are rare; you should take more advantage of them,” Dan exclaims to a student caught cheating on his test. Dan is certainly given chances to change his life, and it would certainly pay dividends for him to listen to his own advice. But from time to time we need others to remind us how to live by our own principles; and Dan is fortunate enough to find such a person.

Rating: 8/10

-Joshua Albrent

Next time: A review of Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, an Irish war drama by Ken Loach.