Ryan Gosling, Anthony Mackie, Shareeka Epps
Directed by Ryan Fleck
Rated R

Half Nelson takes a very realistic approach to teaching youth in the inner city. It isn’t filtered and glamorized through the Hollywood machine, i.e. Akeelah and the Bee. (A great film, but a film that’s PG can only be so realistic.) It’s also not a Hallmark-like made-for-TV movie, like the recent The Ron Clark Story starring Matthew Perry.

Half Nelson is an independent film that will likely only play for a short time in a small number of venues, do to its realistic and unmarketable nature. However, that shouldn’t discourage anyone from going out of their way to see it.
Half Nelson stars Ryan Gosling as Dan Dunne, a man who comes from a well-to-do family, but chose to make a difference by teaching junior high history and coaching girls’ basketball in the inner city.
Gosling, best known for The Notebook, is an amazing actor; the one most likely to endure of today’s youthful rising stars by far. He is as good as James Dean or Marlon Brando, not just because of his chameleon-like acting, but also because of his role choices.
In Half Nelson, Dunne tries to touch at least one soul, and he can’t even see when he’s succeeded. A father comes up to him at a bar and says his daughter is a history major at Georgetown thanks to Dunne. Dunne, disillusioned, doesn’t even remember the student.
This, I’m sure, is a result of his cocaine addiction. Dunne ends up being eaten alive by the factors that plague and challenge his students on a daily basis.
When one of his students, Drey (Epps), finds him snorting up after a basketball game, she sees how little she knows about her teacher.
Drey, who lives in a troubled home, often gets a ride home from Dunne, who lets her know that “one thing doesn’t make a man.” When Drey goes off the deep end with his addiction, it seems the only one who can save him is a kid he’s trying to save.
This unconventional approach to teaching in the inner city is at times jarring. It’s hard to tell what the film is trying to say, when a lot of time is spent on the subject of drugs.
However, there is a class lesson Dunne teaches, focusing on the dichotomy of the Yin and Yang compared to white versus black. He talks about how the Taoists view life as change being the only constant and how during the Civil Rights movement the white majority tried to force blacks to assimilate.
The last scene of the movie lingers on Dunne and Drey sitting on a couch, perhaps suggesting we all just need to stop fighting and start embracing. For the black and white of the Yin and Yang are not two separate entities, but one.