Half Nelson, Dialectics, and Inner City Success Movies

I’m sort of mystified by the glowing reviews given to Half Nelson. It’s not that it’s a terrible movie, but it is a strange, somewhat problematic one. It’s being praised (by Manhola Dargis, for example) for its forthright liberal social/political stance, but, as Jonathan Last has pointed out, making a boldly liberal film isn’t exactly the definition of bravery in the face of danger. Maybe its just the film’s bleak reimagining of the Rocky-in-the-classroom inspiring-white-teacher-in-an-urban-school formula that’s impressed so many critics. Whoever thought that formula, which seemed to have reached its pinnacle with Dangerous Minds (and that kitschy-awesome Coolio song that went along with it) could produce anything above the level of saccharine dreck like Take the Lead? (Brought to you by the director behind a bunch of Avril Lavigne music videos!)

The problem with Half Nelson is that it refuses to subscribe to traditional notions of character motivation, and in doing so, becomes as self-defeating as its protagonist. The film features Ryan Gosling as a young, white, inner city history teacher who lives in urban squalor (they might as well have put up a neon sign exclaiming pay our teachers more!) and also happens to be a crack addict. Gosling bucks the school system by replacing the Civil Rights history packet with off the cuff lectures on Marxian dialectics, teaching his kids about how social change occurs when warring opposites struggle for dominance.

The film’s animating idea is to apply this dialectic approach to social change to individuals. So Gosling’s character is driven on one hand to attempt to aid a promising young woman from his class by trying to keep her from getting involved with a drug dealer. On the other hand, Gosling spends a lot of time mired down in despairing drug binges. There’s no real goal involved in either activity, no reason given why he might do either, except for these two, abstract forces of good and evil that alternately win the battle for Gosling-control.

It’s a total rejection of the typical notion of character motivation, in which characters each have an overarching goal—a desire of some sort—that they work toward by negotiating their way through a web of other characters' goals to complete a string of smaller goals on the road to success. In Half Nelson, no one really does anything for any sort of reason; everyone is simply powered by two competing behavioral engines—one allegedly good and one allegedly bad. The individuals don’t even have any understanding of why they’re doing things; they’re merely compelled, like puppets whose strings are controlled by two separate masters working against each other.

This is tantamount to a total rejection of free will and individual choice, a pretty miserable, and I think, rather untenable view of existence. But more importantly, it's a view that doesn’t make for very compelling filmmaking: If characters can’t control their actions and don’t know or care why they’re doing anything, why should we in the audience care either?