>>PREVIEW
HALF NELSON
Calgary International Film Festival
STARRING Ryan Gosling, Shareeka Epps and Anthony Mackie
DIRECTED BY Ryan Fleck
Tuesday, September 26
The Plaza
Though the film’s subtle political savvy and emotional depth are two reasons why Half Nelson is the year’s most remarkable American indie drama, its Canadian content may be the first thing that intrigues you readers.
The movie is fuelled by a searing, deeply committed performance by Ryan Gosling. The London, Ontario native plays Dan, an inner-city school teacher who spends his days talking to his students about dialectics and his nights rolling into their ’hood to buy drugs. His good intentions and right-on politics are undermined by his capacity for self-destruction, the character coming to embody an array of complex questions about race, class, privilege and social responsibility.
The stakes are raised after his student Drey (Shareeka Epps) catches him smoking crack in a bathroom after a basketball game. Though a connection is made, Dan’s clearly no better as a role model than Frank (Anthony Mackie), a neighbourhood drug dealer who also takes a fatherly interest in the wary teen.
While Half Nelson takes place in the roughest patches of Brooklyn, most of the movie’s music hails from further north. Songs by Broken Social Scene dominate the soundtrack, an expression of deep fandom by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, the twenty-something couple who made Half Nelson and Gowanus, Brooklyn, the award-winning short that served as its basis.
"As we were writing the script we were listening to a lot of their music," says Boden, Half Nelson’s editor, co-writer and co-producer. "We felt it had that emotional soul that we hoped our movie would have. We played their music on set, used it in the cutting room and then at some point we were like, ‘Dude, we should really try to get their permission to use this. It’s so much a heart of the film.’" They flew up to Toronto with a rough cut last year and successfully made their plea.
As for Gosling, the filmmakers didn’t originally consider him because they thought the 26-year-old star of The Believer and The Notebook was too young for the role.
"Somehow he got a hold of the script and liked it," says Fleck, who directed and co-wrote the script with Boden. "We looked at his other movies and he was so good in all of them. We thought that if he’s interested in doing this, we should just make the teacher younger. It was a good choice, not just because Ryan’s great, but because his youth connects him with the students in a way that an older teacher would not."
"He is this idealistic guy who really wants to create change in the world, which is why he becomes a teacher," says Boden, "but he still struggles deeply with his own limitations."
Fleck and Boden say their awareness of their own limitations was the seed for the script. "Anybody who is conscious of anything going on in the world has to feel an element of hypocrisy," says Fleck. "If you’re aware of the conditions in which we’re living, how can you not do something about it? The other question is – what are you supposed to do?"
It doesn’t come as much surprise to learn that the couple started writing Half Nelson when America was ramping up for the second Iraq war – along with millions of others, Fleck and Boden did their best to voice their objections.
"You felt there was so much public resistance across the world," says Fleck. "The New York Times called public opinion ‘the second superpower.’ You felt like, ‘Wow, we’re actually going to make a difference!’ And no, of course not – none of it made a difference."
Boden describes the disconnect they felt, "going to protests and talking amongst friends about how everyone’s going to take to the streets," but then failing to integrate that spirit into their everyday lives. As she laments, "You go back to your job, you go back to your house and you turn on your air conditioning."
Dan’s struggles with his demons and his attempt to reach out to Drey come to represent a wider crisis for liberal-minded young people who wonder how they’re supposed to change the world when they get daily reminders of their own failings. Yet, Half Nelson ultimately argues that social and political engagement is as necessary as it is potentially troubling. The director finds it interesting "to see what kind of baggage different people bring to the film." As he says, "I think some more conservative people react in a kind of bitter way. They blame that on the boundary-crossing in the relationship between the student and the teacher, but you get the sense that something else is eating at them that they don’t want to talk about." |
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