The Netflix Report: Half Nelson
I’m just going to get this out there: Ryan Gosling makes one fine-looking crack addict. Give the man some skinny-guy clothes and a few swipes of undereye shadow, and he still looks better than, say, John Mayer on a good day.
I’d also argue that not many actors would pull off the role of Dan Dunne, history teacher/addict extraordinaire, as convincingly as Gosling does. It’s not the angsty drug-addled parts that show him off; any Christian Bale will do for the serious-eyed stuff. What makes Half Nelson a brilliant intersection of actor and character is the charisma he brings to the rest of Dan’s life—he tells little jokes and makes silly faces and relates to his eighth-graders like he actually cares about them. He’s cute. He’s funny. He has a cat. He’s a mess, but he makes us like him, even as we know what he does on his summer vacation. And that—the normalizing, the un-tragicizing, of a drug addict—is not nothing.
Gosling’s likability, then, goes a way towards softening the blow of Half Nelson, but it’s still not exactly Finding Forrester: addict teacher forms (platonic) relationship with 13-year-old on the brink of becoming a dealer herself. Who saves whom—assuming that anybody is saved, period—is up in the air. It’s a sad little movie, more about hope and hopelessness (or maybe change and repetition) than about actual drugs, and it makes you want good things for Dunne and Drey even as you’re not sure those good things are likely to happen. And that’s probably the best thing about Ryan Fleck’s movie: the setting and the past and the future and just about everything else are murky, but the emotional imperative remains clear. You will like these people, and you will root for them. And if you come out with any hope for them, then that’s a step in the right direction.
dvd, dvd reviews, ryan gosling, ryan fleck, half nelson
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