Half Nelson, starring Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps. Directed by Ryan Fleck.
Ryan Gosling plays D.C. Berman as Robin Williams [who was really Leo Strauss] in Dead Poet’s Society: The Urban Years! Think: Crash meets Akeelah & The Bee [and there are actually cast members from season four of The Wire, too. Don’t get excited. They get two lines between them. Incidentally, it’s Donut and Michael Lee.]
Haven’t there been enough messianic teacher dramas about saving the children already? [Especially in a classroom so undemocratic that the kids can only spit out the “right” answers? There’s a whole lot of epistemological nonsense going on, and like Williams’ O Captain my Captain, the teacher remains the unquestionable knower. Except this time, dude’s got a major crack habit, Williams’ own substance abuse notwithstanding.]
[Let’s not talk about the nauseating handheld shots meant to impart “realness” to the telling.]
Did all the best message movies come out last year? Can’t American independent cinema be better than this? Half Nelson has the politics of Air America radio! [And was twice as inertial with it’s “what should I do’s”. For starters, try something other than pathetic liberal navel-gazing. And attempted rape, which to me signified what this carpetbagger as saviour was really accomplishing, which was little more than occupation (no pun.)]
Like so many movies about the inner city and progressive politics, the effort to be even-handed results in a lose-lose outcome where it’s not possible for things to change. The vocabulary of the “culture of poverty” is so powerful that no one can resist its ideological pull, nor its tautological basis, the sort of “May the cycle remain unbroken” sort of cynicism and burnout that plagues both sociology and social work.
The result is a neutered Hull House mentality of do-gooderism that is both totally impotent and morally relativistic, e.g. there’s no use in “saving” these kids — they live by standards and codes wholly different from mine — and through this perverse identity politics there can be no such thing as solidarity, just difference as fetish.
[Incidentally, “culture of poverty” and “underclass” are more flavors of bullshit than I care to taste.]
As a belated postscript, Broken Social Scene still totally suck.
2 responses to “Best intentions.”
most of this is, of course, right on, most especially the navel gazing. but i think that you’re assuming that fleck isn’t nauseated. he is, and i definitely don’t think that berman is a messiah. he’s cynical and burned out, as you also note, and fleck shows how this can lead to absolute asshole-dness (see “little more than occupation”).
whether or not i think that this is an accurate depiction of the inner city and progressive politics are (or should be) is a completely different issue, but i was greatful that i finally saw, well, a burned-out asshole on screen.
instead, my friends in teach for america were shown films like akeelah and the bee, and taught to trust that their good-white-liberal education was all they needed to succeed. now, they’re realizing that they have no clue about what to do, or how to do it, so they’re doing other things up the ass and more up the nose. that’s disgusting, of course, and so is half nelson, but both are realities i know, whereas traffic just pissed me off. maybe that’s not truth, but i thought it was worth the seven bucks.
isn’t the title meant to imply “wrestling” with something? i think that the whole focus on “dialectics” was meant to be a well-intentioned, if poorly executed, attempt at teaching/thinking outside the box.
i don’t think that fleck was nauseated at all really. he doesn’t make his lead character look like that much of an asshole; he’s just a confused, strung out guy who’s living all over a bunch of kids whom he thinks he’s helping.
if you’re looking for burned out assholes on screen — they’re everywhere! this was for teach for america what requiem for a dream and american history x were for their subjects: a weak case study in america’s problems.