| Overall Grade: |
A- |
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| Story: |
B+ |
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| Acting: |
A+ |
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| Direction: |
A- |
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| Visuals: |
A- |
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Teacher Teach Thyself
by ruth (movies profile)
Feb 16, 2007
3
of
4 people found this review helpful
Ryan Gosling plays Dan Dunne, a drug-addicted (& drug addled) high school teacher and girl's basketball coach in an inner city school in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. He was superb as a bright, promising and humane young man who has gone pretty much off the rails into the world of drugs. He maintains that the kids keep him straight during the day, but that's simply not the case. And the example he sets for them is appalling. At one point, when he catches one of his students cheating, he sits him away from the class and says "This is your second chance. Not many people get one." In fact, he gets about seven chances and blows them all.
When Dunne is caught in flagrante with drugs by 13 year old Drey (played with great finesse by Shareeka Epps), one of his students, we hope that he will be shocked onto the wagon. Epps plays a girl trying to survive in a very tough world. Her mother, a decent woman who works all the time as an EMT, has been abandoned by her husband & lost her son, Michael, to prison for a drug charge, has little time for Drey.
Dunne's drug connection, Frank, was Michael's co-conspirator but was not caught. Dunne, the junkie, thinks himself a better model for Drey than Frank. He is, but only because he is not trying to pull her into the drug-world as Frank is. After all, in the world of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
The movie's attempt to explain or even excuse Dunne's addiction by showing us his alcoholic parents was its weakest point.
Half Nelson would be a great anti-drug movie if Dunne, even in his degraded state, weren't so appealing. Ultimately, it is the 13 year old Drey who seems likely to become the teacher ..... quite a burden for a kid who enough things to cope with as it is, but one has the sense that Drey, who can make it in Red Hook, can, unlike Dunne, make it anywhere. Their fragile friendship throws us a faint ray of hope for Dan. |
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