Review of Half Nelson (2006) by Kase V — 24 Jan 2012

Ok, so first of all, how in the world does Ryan Gosling's character in this movie afford the lifestyle he does on a teachers salary? Absurd.

This movie is weird. It is beautifully acted but the whole premise of it and the fact that I'm not sure anything get's resolved kind of left me annoyed. The most painful thing to watch is how it starts off with this teacher who seems really cool, and then you get this other 'father figure' character for the girl who seems really cool, and yet somehow (slight spoiler alert, skip this sentence if you don't want to know general knowledge about what happens) they both end up being not so great people and then the movie just leaves you with this feeling of "oh, so I just watched a movie about a girl stuck with some not so great people who end up still being not so great people" (end of run on sentence). At first I was going to rate this movie pretty low because of this, but then I realized the way the movie slowly ads to the girls poor circumstances is actually really well done (even kind of poetic, yeah, I'll say that), and that along with the acting do make this a very good movie, or at least I could see the art behind it.

In the end, I appreciate it and would say if you want to watch a good movie just for the sake of watching a well made, well written, well acted movie then 'Half Nelson' wouldn't be a bad choice. Just don't expect to feel great watching it (although some parts are really nice) or to really get anything out of it. Well, you will get one thing out of it: a lot of civil rights facts that for some reason the movie feels are important to the story, but really only had me trying to figure out what sort of commentary the movie was making about race, when in actuality I'm not sure it made any commentary about race at all.

I also just realized I have no idea why this movie is called 'Half Nelson'. How are you going to make a 1 hr. 47 min. movie and never tell me why it's called what it is? You know what, I dig that. (It's also very possible I just missed it, sorry if that is the case).