Half Nelson

I went last night because I really wanted to see a good movie and the reviews for this pic were great. Yipes. They were pretty off. This is a decent movie, with some awful, actually...unforgiveable...moments.

Gosling is a good young actor, but I don't think he was directed particularly well in the film. It looks to me like the screenplay got the Sundance Lab treatment and they fixed a lot dialog to make it well crafted. The little girl was excellent, I thought.

The shooting style - ugly. Lots of lazy close ups, you can tell they just rolled a lot of film with the plan of making it work in editing. Then they'd do a wide to end scenes. The entire movie had the same editing pattern. It gave me a bit of a headache.

The intersperced parts of documentary footage and kids talking to the camera. Ugh. Cringeworthy. The "subtle" point about September 11, 1973 being the day the CIA helped topple democractically elected communist Allende in Chile was not lost upon anyone in the audience who would prefer to remember 9/11 as America's comeupance. Sadly, at the Sunset 5, I'd venture to guess half of the audience falls into that camp.

But the worst part, the part I'm not even sure the filmmakers were aware of, was the fact that the Gosling character was a pretty awful teacher. He used his charming personality to overwhelm the students into listening to his childish rants about the machine and the man and opposites, lessons that didn't make any sense whatsoever, the kind of chit chat that seems to only exist in the wee hours of the night in a college dorm room between kids getting high for the first time together.

What I found particularly awful about the POV of the film was that I think they were trying to show what a great teacher this guy was or at least was capable of being - if he just didn't do drugs. But in truth, what we have is a narcissistic baby ranting and raving to students because he feels basically impotent about his role in the world. He's using his charm to avoid doing his job and actually being kind of a dickhead to kids who he's supposed to be teaching. The moment when a thankful parent mentions to him that his daughter is starting college at Georgetown as a history major makes very little sense to me a) Because I don't believe he's inspired any of the kids in the classroom and b) Because he's way to young to have been teaching for 5+ years already.

It makes me almost understand the criticism people have about Bill Clinton, that this guy a sleeze-monger and that everything his does is to serve his own weird ambitions for power and acceptence, that at his core, he just really wants to be loved by everyone to make up for his father being distant. Yeah, trite, but I don't know...but I see the same thing with the Gosling character in the movie.

I should have told him this at Sunset Junction last night.