Higher Ground

Half Nelson.jpg
It's an old American movie cliche: an affluent but mixed-up white character is helped and guided by a black character who, despite being poor, is blessed with a head that is screwed on straight.  In the old days the formula was a rich socialite and a salty, wise-cracking maid, or a great leader and a humble but wise valet.  More recently we have seen a spoiled golfer and a clairvoyant caddy (The Legend of Bagger Vance) and a scruffy but honest cop and a smooth but honorable crook (American Gangster).

This hardly exhausts the list, but you get my drift.  All the more credit, then, to the 2006 indie film Half Nelson, for making the old cliche new.  Ryan Gosling is superb as a history teacher in a struggling Brooklyn middle school whose life is spiraling out of control, due to a cocaine habit rapidly turning into a crack addiction.  His classes consist of pop Marxism laced with political ideas ca. 1968, but his mordant, self-effacing riffs capture the imagination of one student, a 13-year-old girl whose mother works long hours as a security guard and whose only other adult influence is the neighborhood drug dealer, who looks out for her because he feels responsible for having landed her older brother in prison.

When the student discovers the teacher's drug problem, the tables begin, ever so slowly and subtly, to turn -- until, without a single false note, the student emerges as the salvation (we hope) of the teacher.

Then best thing about Half Nelson is the performance of Shareeka Epps as a young girl who just happens to be the moral center of at least four other lives: her mother's, her brother's, (improbably) the drug dealer's -- and her teacher's.  That's a lot to pull off, but Epps's performance looks effortless.  She and Gosling are two of the most remarkable actors out there today (which is why they don't seem to be getting many parts).

I've already told you how the story comes out.  But this is not a "feel-good" movie in the usual sense of the term.  The ending is hardly uplifting, it just manages to lift us slightly higher than we were before -- and that feels not good, exactly, but somehow miraculous and believable.
June 14, 2009 7:29 PM |

Categories:

Soundtrax

PRC Pop 

The Chinese pop music scene is like no other ...

Remembering Elvis 

The best part of him will never leave the building ...

Beyond Country 

Like all chart categories, "country" is an arbitrary heading under which one finds the ridiculous, the sublime, and everything in between. On the sublime end, a track that I have been listening to over and over for the last six months: Wynnona Judd's version of "She Is His Only Need." The way she sings it, irony is not a color or even a set of contrasting colors; it is iridescence.

Miles the Rock Star? 

Does Miles Davis belong in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame? Here's my take on his career ...

Essay Contest 

Attention, high school jazz listeners ...

more trax

Me Elsewhere

Edward Hopper 

Painter of light (and darkness) ...

Dissed in Translation 

Here's my best shot at taking Scorcese down a few pegs ...

Henri Rousseau Revisited 

"Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris" appeared at the National Gallery of Art in Washington this fall ...

Paul Klee's Art 

Paul Klee was not childish, despite frequent comparisons between his art and that of children...

Our Art Belongs to Dada 

Rent my "Dadioguide" tour of the Dada show (before it moves to MoMA) ...

more picks

Blogroll

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Martha Bayles published on June 14, 2009 7:29 PM.

Dan Brown Redux was the previous entry in this blog.

Social Trust is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.