Review of It's Kind of a Funny Story (2010) by Shiira — 14 Oct 2010

Stop me if you've heard this one before; it's the story of the "great white hope", an inner-city, public middle school teacher, the inspirational type, naturally, who sees a black youth in trouble, a girl on the verge of entrenching herself forever within the drug trade, the nefarious culture of gangbangers, thus inspiring Dan Dunne(Ryan Gosling) to take it upon himself to make a difference(as the bylaws of the genre dictates that he does so), and tries to save her.

Saving Drey(Shareeka Epps) becomes Mr. Dunne's mission. Intervening on his student's behalf, the teacher, full of piss and vinegar...and self-righteousness, pays the drug dealer a visit, in which the girl's mentor lectures the pusherman about the bad influence he poses toward his young niece.

This is the crucial juncture in the movie where the half-nelson that the filmmakers put on the story's form and content, struggles to break free, and abide by those genre bylaws, but can't. While the narrative, at the outset, may not differ much from other teacher/savior flicks such as John N.

Smith's "Dangerous Minds" and Richard LaGravenese's "Freedom Writers"(to name a few), Mr. Dunne's unanticipated actions previous to his momentous showdown with the antagonist, instigates a whole new set of circumstances that forces a divergence from the genre norms, and throws "Half-Nelson" into chaos.

Dan, as it turns out, has a serious problem, a problem that does serious damage to his integrity, in which the girl's supposed knight and shining armor suddenly lacks the moral authority to save anybody.

It's kind of a funny story, a riposte to the "white man's burden" scenario, as "Half-Nelson" saddles itself with a crack addict as its protagonist, hardly the role model that this sort of archetypal movie calls for.

Bobby(Zach Galafanakas) is no role model either, a verbal admission he makes to Craig(Keir Gilchrist), the boy at risk whom the divorced father of a young daughter mentors at the psychiatric ward of the Argenon Hospital, as opposed to the silent epiphany that Dan undergoes, the instantaneous realization of this confused man's own ethical impotence which visibly washes above board his face.

It stops the outraged teacher's hypocritical speechifying; this crack addict's stern reprimand, cold, in mid-stream, toward a nonplussed Frank(Anthony Mackie), when Dan realizes the irony of the situation, the dialectical impasse at hand, as there can be no supply without demand, but here is a textbook example of oppositional forces at work; it's as if Dan wrote out the situation on his chalkboard, in which a drug user tells the drug dealer to stop trafficking.

It's kind of a funny story. Stripped of any racial and sexual differences, the dynamics between Bobby and Craig is nevertheless, the same story, an equally gelastic one, full of the same contradictions, where the mentor(Galafinakas), a man who attempted suicide six times, has the gall to advise his pupil against killing himself, while extolling the virtues of life.

Whereas Drey helps an incapacitated Mr. Dunne out from a school bathroom stall, therefore greatly undermining his institutional ascendancy to shape a young mind, the shifting balance of power, likewise, occurs in "It's Kind of a Funny Story" when Craig helps Bobby prepare for a group home interview, going so far as loaning his mentor a clean shirt.

Bobby knows the music, but not the words, so he just rips off the words("That he is not busy being born is busy dying," from the Bob Dylan track "It's Alright, Ma(I'm Only Bleeding)") that describe matters concerning life and death, and it shows, because his own words turn out to be a sort of anti-poetry, an aesthetic emblematized by prosaic whininess and narcissistic vampirism.

In the cafeteria, Bobby chastises a consorting patient, a regular at the table, for taking Craig's breakfast burrito, but later in "It's Kind of a Funny Story", a darker story, one that was probably intended to promote fraternalism, emerges, where Bobby makes a petition to his disciple's soul on the basketball court, asking Craig that he ".

..be young," and "live ife like it meant something," which has the ring of a desperate man who would take Craig's life if he could. One more suicide attempt makes seven, unlucky seven, if he survives.

Considering the setting, an Ingmar Bergman film sits waiting on the sidelines, hoping for a time-out and genre substitution. Rather than play chess with death, like the knight does in "The Seventh Seal", Bobby could challenge Craig to a game of one-on-one, or horse(slang for "heroin"), for his life, like something out of Peter Hewitt's "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey".

It's kind of a funny story because it's Zoloft that saves Craig, ultimately, just like how crack saves Drey, in which both teenagers free themselves with drugs, both legal and illegal, as an elixir for the benevolent tyranny of deeply flawed men.