Finally got around to seeing this small independent offering that garnered its star Ryan Gossling a best actor nomination at this years Oscars. It’s a strange film that had a strange effect on me as I tried to come to terms with how I felt about these characters. On one level you’re getting a movie dabbling with the trite and cliched Hollywood great white hope as a caucasian teacher diligently tries to reach inner city black kids. On another level it’s about an incorrigible junkie who happens to be that white teacher who’s not all that diligent. And it’s a kid caught between a vaguely creepy relationship with him and the pull of the streets put on her by the far more appealing drug dealer character pulling her into the life that put her brother in prison.

Gossling is Dan Dunn, a rebellious, anti-authoritarian teacher that only briefly suggests the kind of Dead Poets Society captain of young souls before you quickly realize that some of his anti-establishment stance is the weak vestiges of his long since shipwrecked and defeated idealism. Now he’s just bitter, angry, and unable to connect with people. It’s a testimony to how good both the acting and writing is in this movie that you get a sense of these things while being given so little overtly. For instance you only see Dunn’s family once for about 5 minutes and everything from his addiction, to his anger, to his inability to open up come through from the way everyone in his family holds a wine glass constantly, the way his father looks at him and makes light of his job, and his mothers unspoken concern and barely suppressed restraint. His parents are apparently 60′s liberals and we can see in Dunn’s directionless rants about Iraq and the polls showing how people still think there are WMD’s and a connection between Iraq and Al-Quada, how that liberal ideal has become that shipwrecked anger. It’s there in between the lines which reveal the connection to his family and his own inner turmoil.

And all while spending a very short time giving us these clues or examining his behavior.

The subtle way this and more of what is happening in the main characters lives comes across is so understated I think people are going to either just completely not get it or have it really get under their skin and effect them. Count me among the latter. For the former I think they’ll find this a boring and pointless movie. For those like me in the second category this was almost dangerously revealing.

One theme stated early on through Dunn’s history class concerns opposing forces and how conflict changes things. The movie illustrates some of this through video accompanying the kids oral reports about key moments Dunn has them research as punishment for making fun of other classmates. We get a vision of the civil rights movement, gay rights, political activism inspired by union activist Mario Salvo and the U.S. role in that other 9-11 when we helped take out the democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chile to install Pinochet. Dunn has wanted to write a kids book about the dialectic process and how it changes history.

And yet in a movie with a character almost archly obsessed with opposing forces and that Socratic dialectic you’ve got a movie in which neither of the two opposing forces I mentioned pulling at the girl are quite worthy of rooting for.

At least not overtly. There are too many shades of grey here. Neither Gossling or the charismatic dealer are bad. Both are likable. Gossling is also pathetic at times. The dealer misguided and self-serving. But that’s part of the appeal of the movie. It’s partly about growing up. For both main characters, teacher and pupil. And that’s not always a clean or clear cut process. And the movie doesn’t necessarily make it clear how successful either character will be. But they are changed. They go about quietly noticing things and showing those subtle signs of maturity that could easily pass for adaptation or inner strength depending on your way of looking at things.

There’s a point in the movie, I think it’s in the scene with his family, when someone pulls out the Marlo Thomas 70′s staple of growing up, “Free To Be You And Me,” and puts it on the record player. I have vaguely fond memories of listening to that thing and in some small part being shaped by it. I know a lot of people my age do. I recognized the LP album cover as soon as it appeared. I can remember holding it my hands and looking at its now oversized vinyl album cover and studying the lyrics inside.

Maybe it was brought out here to juxtapose the less bright and sweet reality of growing up the movie suggests. Maybe it was there to show how even when you’re a bit older like Gossling in his late 20′s-early 30′s or his parents who probably discovered the feel good kids album of individuality, many of us making up a generation raised by hippies and video games, still playing them, watching Star Wars, and buying more shiny toys like CD’s and DVD players, have a much more amorphous relationship with growing up than is usually presented as normal. Perhaps a crippled one compared to previous generations before the Baby Boomer parents.

Either way i enjoyed its inclusion and how it underscored the more sullen optimism of the movie. Through contradiction that is. As in opposing forces I guess. I’ve always been a fan of that dialectic process and a big believer that it’s at the core of a true democracy. Half Nelson shows how that process isn’t always as clean and black and white as we want it to be.