Half Nelson

"Half Nelson" is about a young eighth-grade history teacher in Brooklyn, Dan (Ryan Gosling), and his relationship with one of his favorite students, the sensible Drey (Shareeka Epps), who also plays on the basketball team, which Dan coaches.   We’ve seen inner-city classroom dramas before.   Distinguishing this film is its remarkable eschewal of all Hollywood-isms, oh, and the fact that the good-humored teacher/coach happens to have a raging crack addiction.  

He is white and she is black.   I mention race because it’s one of the film’s themes; another is history.   Neatly incorporating both themes, director Ryan Fleck gives us shots of a collection of those antebellum figurines of mammies and minstrels with hideously exaggerated leering features.   They’re owned, ironically, by a black person, a neighborhood crack dealer who seeks to mentor Drey.   Witnessing her coach in thrall to the drug has aroused her curiosity about the dark side of the street: she discovers him lying in a bathroom stall, pathetic and helpless--not in distress, just so high that he can’t stand up.   Her eyes are hard as she crouches over him, but they don’t register shock.   Life has taught Drey that people do what they have to do in this world to get by.  

Dan wants to teach the kids the history of oppression; he wants badly that they should grasp dialectics, the concept that change is a product of the clash of opposing forces.   As they give oral reports on various social clashes, Fleck shows us footage of their subjects: the Attica rebellion, the U.S. backed overthrow of Allende by Pinochet on 9/11 (’73, that is), the great Mario Savio, Harvey Milk.  

Observing Dan’s bookshelf Drey drolly notes, “You’ve sure got a lot of books about black people.”   His shelves creak with lefty theoretical tomes; the problem for Dan is that human beings don’t conform to monolithic theories, which do violence to the irony and complexity of human life.   Not that these ironies are lost on him: though he’s against “the Man,” Dan finds himself confronting a member of the black lumpen-proletariat--the dealer, from whom he’s desperate that Drey stay away.  

At a dinner party at Dan’s parents’ place, wine and cocktails flow.   His mom, a “60’s generation” person, puts their old copy of “Free to Be You and Me” on the turntable and places the needle on “It’s Alright to Cry.”   As he listens tears well up and his face contorts.   Meanwhile his dad, in his cups and making jokes about Ebonics, can’t conceal his bitterness toward inner-city denizens, proximity to whom he feels has turned his son into a crack head.   It’s such a well-turned scene: we meet these people for only a moment, but like the main characters they feel fully drawn.   I feel like I’ve known variations of almost all of the people in this movie.  

This is smart, honest filmmaking, though some viewers will be unsatisfied or even annoyed because, while the film shows the horrible problems and barbarous behavior that smoking crack causes in Dan’s life (making him particularly woeful at handling such emotions as anger and lust), it never shows him struggling to change (or even wanting to).   I’ve rarely seen a film so non-judgmental of its characters.   This approach echoes Drey’s non-judgmental view of Dan and the other people in her life.   Like Drey, this film takes the world as it finds it.

- Sep 24, 2006

Little Miss Sunshine

“Little Miss Sunshine” is a comedy and a road movie about a family with nothing left to lose.   After his doctor orders him not to be alone following a suicide attempt, Frank (Steve Carrel), a gay Proust scholar, moves in with his sister Sheryl (Toni Collette) and her dysfunctional, unhappy family (sounds hilarious so far, no?).   She’s stressed by their finances and verges on being fed up with her unsuccessful husband, Richard (Greg Kinnear), who aspires to be one of those banal motivational speakers peculiar to American culture, exhorting his few listeners to will themselves into “winners”.   Their alienated teenage son has taken a vow of silence inspired by Nietzsche, evidencing by his interest in the philosopher of “the will” that he’s perhaps internalized his father’s spiel more than he’d care to admit.   Richard’s own father (Alan Arkin) is a profane, heroin-snorting WWII vet.  

Seven-year-old Olive dreams of winning a beauty contest despite being far from a JonBenet (she’s a bit homely and pudgy, with horn-rimmed spectacles).   When they receive late notice that she’s a finalist in a beauty/talent contest to be held in California, the family hops in their ramshackle VW van to try to make it from Albuquerque to the Sunshine State in time.   Whatever their contempt for one another, love for young Olive unites them.   She’s their shared project, their common interest.   Abigail Breslin is just right in the role, particularly in a scene with Arkin in which she reveals to her grandpa her secret fear that her daddy will shun her as a loser if she doesn’t win.  

On the American TV version of “The Office” Carrel plays the “slimy boss” (to use the phrase coined by Ricky Gervais to describe the character he invented and played so brilliantly in the British original).   It’s interesting to muse that Carrel could have been cast effectively in this movie as Richard, the loser obsessed with winning.   Likewise, a casting director recalling Kinnear’s performance in “As Good As it Gets” might justifiably have pegged him to play Frank, the depressive gay fellow.  

This is one of those rare occasions when I can confidently say that everyone within earshot of my reviews will thoroughly enjoy this movie.   It has more heart than anything I’ve seen recently, and while it focuses its critique on the creepiness of eroticized beauty contests for little girls, in a subtle way it’s more broadly questioning of “success” as a U.S. cultural value.   It’s about conformity and happiness and dreams in today’s America, saying that being your own eccentric self is preferable in every way to being “normal”. 

- Aug 27, 2006

A Prairie Home Companion

This elegiac comedy/fantasy from Robert Altman is not a “concert film” of a performance of “Prairie”, but a work of fiction about the closing night of a long-running radio show much like it, in which Garrison Keillor plays a befuddled version of himself.   Keillor rubs many intellectual types the wrong way, but I’m not too bothered by his complacent folksiness.   There’s a droll serenity to his persona that I like.   Even his bland warbling has a certain warmth, and though his gentle satire of Middle America is not really my cup of tea, his show is enjoyable when it showcases the stirring traditional music sung by Americans on those long, lonely prairie nights and in their churches--music of community.   Much of this film is music; the songs are sung by the actors, who acquit themselves decently, though I doubt you’ll be compelled to trouble your local record store clerk for a copy of the soundtrack.  

I was intrigued to see what would be the harvest of the conflict between the visions of Keillor, who wrote the film, and the iconoclastic Altman.   The resulting film’s voice is recognizably Altman’s.   He has a distinctive way of seeing; he’s not directing the ensemble cast so much as he’s observing them, as interested as we are to see what they’ll do next.   I enjoyed his playful mise en scene: framed by doorways and mirrors, discrete images are formed.   Thus, in a sense his frame contains several shots at once, combining mise en scene and montage.    
   
Backstage we meet colorful characters such as the Johnson Girls (Meryl Streep, Lilly Tomlin, and Meryl’s teen-angst-ridden daughter, played by Lindsay Lohan).   We’re reminded that one of the things cinema is “about” is the human face whenever we see a close-up of Tomlin’s wonderful mug.   "Prairie" connoisseurs will know that Keillor plays detective Guy Noir in the show’s weekly, moderately amusing noir send-up; in the film, Noir is brought to life in a quite funny turn by Kevin Kline as the theatre’s incompetent security guard, investigating sightings of a mysterious woman moving about the theater (Virginia Madsen).  

Slight, but full of laughter and music, this film is a pleasure from start to finish. 

- Jul 19, 2006

An Inconvenient Truth

I attended a screening of this film with a packed house of well-off suburban liberals, a well-bred group made rambunctious by the prospect of seeing this documentary of their hero, Al Gore, giving his slide show on global warming.   During the trailer for Winterbottom’s upcoming film on Guantanamo Bay, a cry for “Impeachment!” went up from somewhere in the theatre and was met with hearty applause (with yours truly contributing a few firm claps).   Clearly, “An Inconvenient Truth” would be preaching to the converted this night.  

As for me, Gore’s never been my hero.   In fact, in 2000 I had no more use for him than I did for W.   Ages ago, during my days in the trenches of the enviro movement, we yearned for a bit “less talk and more rock” from the veep.   I remember a comrade commenting bitterly, “Al Gore should read his book”.   Indeed, the youthful, callow S. Pfeiffer might’ve gone so far as to satirize this film’s title as “An Establishment Tool,” for as such he always regarded the man.   (Gore’s actual record on the environment was outlined in Alexander Cockburn’s and Jeffrey S. Clair’s lively book from 2000, "Al Gore: A User’s Manual", in which he appears as rather more a heel than a hero).  

It will give you some idea of the power of this film, then, to say that I came out of it an admirer.   Though the film impresses as a ringing tocsin, it’s just as interesting as a character study.   We are shown a Gore who is intelligent and committed, but who is also visited by self-doubt: he says he often feels that he’s failed to get this message across, no matter how hard he’s tried.   To explain what drives him to tour with the slide show, which he says he's presented over 1,000 times, Gore points to the near tragedy of his son’s 1989 accident.   To illustrate the need to have the courage to change, he tells of how his father stopped farming tobacco after his sister Nancy died of cancer.   (Our authors, writing six years ago, charge that Gore shamelessly exploits these incidents for political gain, but I found the anecdotes moving and appropriate in the context of this film).  

With often stunning images--this film benefits from a big screen--“Truth” makes a stirring case that, as Andrew Revkin recently wrote in the New York Times, summing up the prevailing scientific view, “without big changes in emissions rates, global warming from the buildup of greenhouse gases is likely to lead to substantial, and largely irreversible, transformations of climate, ecosystems and coastlines later this century.”   You’ll learn how global warming causes both flooding and drought; how hurricanes pick up velocity as they go over warm water; and about the import of such things as the ocean current system and the melting Greenland and East Antarctic Ice Sheets.   There’s a desire for change to the film that is honest and infectious.   Radicals and “conservatives” alike will scoff, but for mainstream people with their hearts in the right place, this is highly recommended.

In the end, what is the inconvenient truth about Al Gore?   Is he the tireless crusader presented in this film, or the servant of moneyed interests portrayed in Cockburn and St. Clair’s book?   Well, as I once heard C. Hitchens put it: the truth never lies, but when it does lie, it lies somewhere in between.

- Jun 23, 2006

L'Enfant

This Belgian outing written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne introduces us to Bruno (Jeremie Renier), a fun-loving, childish petty criminal.   He’s no tough; indeed, his partner-in-crime is a prepubescent schoolboy.   His girlfriend Sonia (Deborah Francois) has just had his baby boy, Jimmy.   Biting and swatting each other playfully while Bruno drives, roughhousing on the grass, the young couple enjoys the hand-to-mouth life.   Sonia shares Bruno’s immaturity but whereas she’s a fine mother, loving and responsible, Bruno will barely look at the baby, who’s an irrefutable pink announcement of his advent at adulthood’s doorstep.   So he takes the baby for a little walk and, acting on a tip, sells his newborn on the black market.          

With its hand-held camera, naturalistic acting and absence of score, one could point to “L’Enfant” and say, “This is realism”.   We always have a sense of life extending beyond the frame thanks to the Dardennes’ artful use of open form mise en scene and sound.   For example, having deposited the baby in a room of a seedy building, Bruno stands in an adjacent room; we listen with him to the approaching footfalls of the unseen man coming to collect his baby.  

The Dardennes’ achievement is to reveal Bruno’s essential innocence.   He sells Jimmy for a big payday but also in a naïve belief that he’s giving the boy a good home.   When he tells Sonia that he doesn’t understand what he did that’s so bad, he’s telling the truth.   “We’ll have another one,” he says by way of consoling her.   The film is ultimately about Bruno’s redemption, but more than that it’s about his learning to understand that he’s in need of redemption in the first place.   In the final scene he’s finally able to refer to Jimmy by name, thus waving “adieu” to the fancy-free life.

- May 29, 2006