A tip of the hap to Chris Sciabarra for pointing this article out. Jim F.
-------------------- http://tinyurl.com/h5fua July 30, 2006 In Half Nelson, Opposing Forces Are Bound by Political Faith By DENNIS LIM THE finer points of dialectical theory have bedeviled many a philosophy major, but Friedrich Engels once said dialectics was such a fundamentally simple concept that any child could grasp it. Half Nelson, a new independent film about an idealistic young Brooklyn teacher, takes this claim at face value. Everything is made of opposing forces, the white instructor tells his mostly black eighth graders, having illustrated his point with an arm-wrestling match. The movie itself is a suitably dialectical web of dualities, reversals and contradictions. To wit: THESIS Half Nelson is a classroom bonding movie, built on the unlikely friendship between Dan (Ryan Gosling), a history teacher with little regard for the formal curriculum, and Drey (Shareeka Epps), one of his quieter and more mature students. ANTITHESIS Half Nelson is an addiction drama. Dan may be an oddly effective pedagogue, but hes also a crack fiend, as Drey learns when she finds him collapsed in a bathroom stall, pipe in hand. SYNTHESIS Half Nelson is a political allegory, a film about a would-be visionary who wants to change the world but cant get his act together and is often his own worst enemy. Its not a stretch to read it as a comment on the sorry state of the American left. That was more or less conscious, the films director, Ryan Fleck, said of the political subtext. Mr. Fleck, 29, wrote Half Nelson with his partner, Anna Boden, 26, who also edited the movie. Working out of the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, the two have been a couple since they were film students, Mr. Fleck at New York University, Ms. Boden at Columbia. They started writing Half Nelson (which opens on Aug. 11) four years ago, as the Bush administration was preparing to invade Iraq and the antiwar movement was gaining momentum. It felt like we were going to protests every other week, Mr. Fleck said recently. But ultimately you dont have the energy to do it all, and you feel like youre doing very little. A big part of the frustration was the inability to make meaningful change. The activist spirit comes naturally to Mr. Fleck, who was born to socialist parents on a commune in Berkeley, Calif. As a child he was taken to rallies and protests. As a teenager he read Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. The Fleck familys political leanings were also a partial catalyst for Mr. Fleck and Ms. Bodens first feature-length collaboration, Young Rebels, a 2005 documentary about Cuban hip-hop. We have this joke that Ryan was sent to Cuba instead of summer camp, said Ms. Boden, a Boston native. While in college Mr. Fleck traveled to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, a group that sponsors work expeditions there in defiance of the travel ban for Americans. A few years later he returned to Cuba with Ms. Boden and tapped into an underground rap culture full of diverse political viewpoints: anti-Castro, anti-Bush and everything in between. Mr. Flecks father, Jack Lucero Fleck, a San Francisco traffic engineer, was a central influence on Half Nelson. A dialectics autodidact, the senior Mr. Fleck maintains a Web site, dialectics4kids.com, which includes educational stories and MP3s of songs like Do Our Lives Go Round in Circles? Many of Mr. Goslings classroom monologues are lifted almost verbatim from the site. Reached in Peru, where he was touring with a Berkeley community chorus that performs Latin American folk songs, Jack Fleck said he was amused to see his lessons repurposed for the movie. I thought it was very creative to bring dialectics into a film by sort of making fun of it, but also teaching it at the same time, he said in an e-mail exchange. He was particularly fond of a few scenes that didnt make the final cut. In one outtake involving a substitute teacher, he said, one of the kids snidely remarked, He probably doesnt even know who Hegel is. While Ryan Fleck looked to his father for inspiration, Mr. Gosling drew on his mother. She home-schooled me for a year, in the sixth grade, he said by telephone from Los Angeles. It was hard for me to retain information. But my mother kind of saved the day. She got creative and figured it out for me. Mr. Gosling also observed a New York public schoolteacher at work. We had a principal set Ryan up with someone his age, Ms. Boden said. (The teacher looked so much like Mr. Gosling that he was given a cameo as Dans brother in the film.) The research went smoothly until, Ms. Boden said, the kids realized he was the guy from The Notebook, and things started to get a little out of hand. Mr. Gosling said he experienced a new kind of pressure to perform, doing take after take on camera before a roomful of young, easily bored nonprofessionals. They would demand that you be entertaining, he said, laughing. It was like, Dance, monkey, dance. It was disgusting how much I was working for their approval. >From his thrift-store wardrobe to his taste in dive bars to the socially conscious titles lining his bookcase, Mr. Goslings Dan makes for a credible Brooklyn hipster. His awareness of being a white, middle-class liberal in a disadvantaged, black milieu (whether hes teaching or buying crack) reflects a parallel sensitivity on the part of the filmmakers. If youre white and you put a black drug dealer in a movie, Mr. Fleck said, referring to a character played by Anthony Mackie, youre going to feel self-conscious about it. Is it irresponsible? The intention was to make the character as complex as everybody else, not a cliché. Having created perhaps the most flavorsome portrait of Brooklyn since Spike Lee worked regularly in the borough (Half Nelson was shot in Gowanus, Fort Greene and East New York), Mr. Fleck and Ms. Boden are moving on to another tale of drugs and high school, this time in moneyed Manhattan: they will adapt Ned Vizzinis comic teenage depression novel, Its Kind of a Funny Story, for Paramount. Theyre also writing an original screenplay about baseball players trained in Dominican academies who end up scraping by in the United States minor leagues. Mr. Fleck said he hoped that their future projects would remain, however obliquely, rooted in a sense of social justice. Filmmaking is kind of a vain hobby when maybe we should all be taking to the streets, he said. But it seems irresponsible not to be informed by politics in some way. Ms. Bodens idealism is more tempered. I dont have an inflated sense of what a movie can do, she said. But you can at least try not to put something out there that you dont believe in. Mr. Fleck added: Thats a rule we try to follow, to not put garbage in the world. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
