Many pop psychologists like to reference the phrase “teachable moments”, a term meaning an experience we can learn from. It’s not a term I’m terribly fond of, as it seems a bit obvious. We’re all works in progress, and so we learn all the time. However, if any film could be about teachable moments, it’s the indie flick Half Nelson.
Directed by Ryan Fleck and co-written by Anna Boden with Fleck, the film focuses on what can only be described as a drug triangle. Dan, an inner -city teacher, portrayed by Ryan Gosling, is struggling with a cocaine and crack addiction. When he sneaks into the toilets at school one day to get high, thinking he’s alone, he’s caught by a teenage pupil Drey (Shareeka Epps). Her concern for him turns into an unlikely friendship between the pair.
However, in a nice plot twist, Dan’s drug dealer Frank (Anthony Mackie) is the same dealer who got Drey’s brother Mike sent to prison. Hence, the drug triangle.
This film is beautiful: tough, poignant and funny, with no “white saviour” bullshit. Dan is a mess: if anything, it’s Drey who is more sensible. Without judgement or moralising, the film is a snapshot of addiction in adults, the breakdown of families, and the parentification of kids.
Drey is as ambiguous a character as Dan, on the cusp of womanhood, tough but insecure. Dan is pretty feckless, an intellectual teaching dialectics but unwilling to process his own traumas. Their friendship,too, is ambiguous. Does Drey have a crush on him? We’re never quite sure. Dan is never inappropriate with her, and the ending doesn’t offer an easy resolution, it just ends. I like that.
Gosling is simply superb, with a main role which eschews the whole Michelle Pfeiffer/Robin Williams trope of inspirational figures who have life all figured out. Epps is wonderful as the kid with an interior life who’s old before her time, and Mackie excellent in a supporting role which could have been one-note and villainous. Instead, he’s a charming asshole.
Nobody is particularly “boo hiss” or “yay” here, and that’s the film’s main strength. It’s a subtle portrait of flawed people just trying to get by, and it even ends on an awful joke.
Hit The North 