Although its script was developed at Sundance, where no glib title goes unappreciated, Half Nelson turns out not to be about some poor sap who is somehow diminished, either physically or emotionally, and who also happens to be named Nelson. Be thankful for small favors.
What the title does refer to, as it happens, is a wrestling term (a bit of tacky esoterica that probably gives the movie at least a couple of points right off the bat for sheer hipness). A "half nelson" is a classic wrestling hold that, because it is both extremely painful and nearly impossible to break out of, serves as a handy metaphor for the sticky situation in which the movie's hapless hero finds himself.
That hapless hero is Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), who we first meet sprawled out on the floor of his ratty apartment like a zombie in yesterday's underwear, too paralyzed to even shut off the alarm clock screaming in his ear. Our first impression is that he might be an older version of that kid in Kids, the one who wakes up at the end of the movie after the bender to end all benders and asks, "What happened?" — a seemingly innocuous question that, in light of the monumentally bad behavior it conjures, assumes nearly existential proportions.
Dan Dunne's no kid, but he deals with them every day. It turns out he's a teacher at a junior high school in Brooklyn, where not only does he manage to show up on time every day, believe it or not, but also actually demonstrates a real gift for his job. Dan is the best sort of teacher — smart, funny, personable, engaged — and he actually manages to keep more than his fair share of inner city eighth graders not only awake but interested in Hegelian definitions of history as the struggle of colliding opposites. He's that rare breed of educator who desires critical thinking and ideas, rather than dates, facts and rote memorization. "I want to know consequences," he implores of his students. "I want to know what it all means."
But meaning is something easier preached than attained, especially for Dan Dunne, who is secretly one confused puppy (girlfriend problems, family problems, you-name-it problems), and who leads what can only be described as a double life. When the school day is over and the history books are tucked away neatly in their lockers, Teacher Dan can be found skulking about on the street, copping hard drugs (smack and crack appear to be his fixes of choice), cruising clubs and self-medicating until the wee hours of the morning. Dan is a junkie, more-or-less fully functioning, but a junkie all the same.
The morning after, though, he manages to somehow shake himself from his stupor and the routine starts all over again. Dan squirts some drops into his bloodshot orbs, puts on a clean shirt and shows up in the classroom, a little worse for the wear but ready for another round of nurturing young minds.
Half Nelson is a morality tale, but one we can live with — one that doesn't wear us down with messages. It establishes its set-up quickly, forcefully, with a minimum of fuss, the movie's unspoken irony being that Dan's double life (as he himself must on some level realize) is just the sort of Hegelian dialectic the teacher loves parading before his students. Dan embodies two distinct, opposing forces — dedicated superteacher and stone-cold junkie — and, as both Hegel and Hollywood have taught us, those forces will inevitably collide and lead to something radically different from either.
That collision comes in fairly short order: Dan gets careless one day, fires up his crack pipe in what he presumes to be a deserted bathroom, and is discovered by one of his students, a 13-year-old tomboy named Drey (Shareeka Epps). But even here, with its dramatic conflict introduced, Half Nelson doesn't take the easy route. Rather than rush right into the expected teacher-student bond that a conventional Hollywood movie would immediately begin milking, Half Nelson has Dan and Drey spending most of the film circling each other like wary animals forced to share the same unclean cage, uncomfortable with the dirty little unspoken secret they have in common.
A bond eventually develops, relatively late in the film, but even then Half Nelson generally avoids clichés or excessive sentiment, focusing on the tension created by its two main characters' mutual awareness that things aren't what they seem, that the class hero is not nearly so heroic as he seems.
Filmmakers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden take an unpretentious and refreshingly low-key approach to their story (think a slightly edgier, more urbanized Victor Nunez), with key plot points sometimes delivered almost stealthily and never shoved down our throats. We know that Drey's home life is less than ideal, for instance, but we're left to read between the lines in order to put it all together.
Even when the girl is recruited by the neighborhood drug lord (Anthony Mackie), there are no histrionics, no preaching — just a quiet scene that speaks for itself, with the young girl carefully eyeing the artifacts of the wolf's den. A bowl of candy on the table. A lackey playing a brutal videogame in the corner. A row of racist tchotkes lining a shelf. The pusherman's smile.
The movie's camerawork often verges on documentary-esque, loose and agile without calling undue attention to itself, and the performances — especially from seasoned pro Gosling and newcomer Epps — are admirably naturalistic, with an understated intensity that allows even some of the film's more predictable elements to go down easier.
Half Nelson comes dangerously close to overplaying its hand in the end — for instance, drumming up some audience-pleasing dramatic fireworks by manufacturing an illogical, last-minute confrontation between Dan and the drug kingpin. But even here the movie ultimately redeems itself by saying something interesting in a fairly interesting way.
Although the final showdown doesn't make much sense on the surface (the mild-mannered teacher suddenly hell-bent on deliberately provoking the violent criminal, as if purely on principle), the film seems to be evoking dramatic license here, breaking its own rules and creating a somewhat unbelievable scenario in order to draw our attention to what lies beneath the surface.
Half Nelson presents us with its one last dialectic — the one involving the teacher and the drug pusher — only to poke large holes in it, showing us two individuals who, although ostensibly polar opposites, are both ultimately song-and-dance men, shams. And while you might think a movie that puts so little distance between its supposed hero and villain would be a tad depressing, Half Nelson gets way too deep inside its humans to be anything but the opposite.
This article appears in Sep 20-26, 2006.