By Armond White

Half Nelson

Directed by Ryan Fleck

The title Half Nelson suggests the choke hold that white liberal condescension has on social progress. It’s intended to identify political struggle, but the film inadvertently demonstrates constriction by foolishly making a sanctimonious hero, Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), out of a New York high school history teacher who is also a crack addict. 

Dunne is a crackhead Conrack—to reference Martin Ritt’s 1974 film that movingly recreated author Pat Conroy’s attempt to change the patterns of America’s 1960s apartheid school system. But movie humanism has been steadily scoffed at since Conrack; typically through dismissive attitudes toward socially progressive films like Ritt’s, Stanley Kramer’s (The Defiant Ones and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?) and Elia Kazan’s (Pinky and Gentlemen’s Agreement). In their place, a series of new, grotesquely condescending movies—from City of God to anything starring Samuel L. Jackson—trumpet whites’ hidden resentment about blacks’ troubling, irremediable social status. 

In this perverse development, white do-gooder characters go through a process of self-abasement. Gosling has started to specialize in such hipster masochism with movies like The Believer (where he portrayed a self-hating, Jewish neo-Nazi) and now the basehead protagonist of Half Nelson—the worst of the two films. Director Ryan Fleck and co-writer Anna Boden layout their liberal agenda in Dunne’s classroom lectures. (“History is the study of change over time. Opposites pushing against each other.”) They prove very un-smart about human behavior—the thing Ritt, Kramer and Kazan got especially right. This film’s conceit hinges on Dunne’s relationship to one of his students, Drey (Shareeka Epps). Embodying the full range of liberal presumption, Drey is a black, sullen, fatherless, hoop-dreaming cliche. At 14 years old Drey is also all-wise. When she finds Dunne nodding out in the girls’ locker room, she doesn’t call the cops; we’re meant to believe she understands his pain. This is insulting and white guilt is weak justification for it.

Half Nelson represents the latest, post-wigger version of Norman Mailer’s White Negro formulation in which hipsters project their anxieties and lusts upon figures of black deprivation. Trapped in this patronizing concept, Drey lacks the spontaneity and depth seen in the superb Akeelah and the Bee; a non-patronizing view of a black teen’s aspiration and how it reflects a community’s ethos. Drey is not even permitted the natural emotion of a schoolgirl crush by finding Dunne cute—which he is given Gosling’s Colin Farrell-scruffiness and sleepy, pleading eyes. 

Fleck and Boden bizarrely present Drey as Dunne’s soul mate. Through this cowardly, sentimental nonsense, Drey remains much less than “the keeper of our conscience.” That unique phrase is how William Faulkner described the deep-rooted, unconscious humanism that holds whites in thrall to blacks; it was memorably, dramatically transcribed in Clarence Brown’s great 1949 film of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. (In that movie, a white child who learned to understand a black adult’s dignity stood in for the nation’s gradual, post-WWII enlightenment.)

Today, Fleck and Boden flaunt their post-9/11 liberal bona fides (not their consciences) through Noam Chomsky/William Zinn asides. Half Nelson contains button-pushing references to history that intersperse each sequence and are read aloud by Dunne’s naive students. The point here: their gradual indoctrination to liberal ideology—and vague class struggle—as a form of enlightenment. (Although it hasn’t helped Dunne any.) All this makes Half Nelson the fakest, most infuriating film on race relations since Boaz Yakin made a hero out of a 14-year-old ghetto Machiavelli who vanquished adult drug-dealers in the 1994 Fresh. Sure enough, Yakin is thanked in the end credits of Half Nelson. I unthank him.