Half Nelson (2006)
Average Rating: 7.6/10
Reviews Counted: 153
Fresh: 138 | Rotten: 15
Half Nelson features powerful performances from Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps. It's a wise, unsentimental portrait of lonely people at the crossroads.
Average Rating: 7.9/10
Critic Reviews: 38
Fresh: 36 | Rotten: 2
Half Nelson features powerful performances from Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps. It's a wise, unsentimental portrait of lonely people at the crossroads.
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Average Rating: 3.8/5
User Ratings: 53,756
My Rating
Movie Info
An inner-city teacher struggling with addiction forms an unlikely bond with a young student who catches him in a compromising position in director Ryan Fleck's feature-length adaptation of his own award-winning short film Gowanus, Brooklyn. Despite his dedication to the junior-high students who fill his classroom, idealistic teacher Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) leads a secret life that the majority of his students will never know. When Dunne's drug-soaked nightlife begins to bleed over into his
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Cast
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Ryan Gosling
Dan Dunne -
Shareeka Epps
Drey -
Anthony Mackie
Frank -
Tina Holmes
Rachel -
Jay O Sanders
Russ -
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Nicole Vicius
Cindy -
Deborah Rush
Jo -
Monique Curnen
Isabel -
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Karen Chilton
Karen -
Collins Pennie
Mike -
Sebastian Sozzi
Javier
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Half Nelson Trailer & Photos
All Critics (154) | Top Critics (38) | Fresh (143) | Rotten (15) | DVD (13)
Ryan Gosling's self-destructive teacher is easily the year's most mesmerizing character study. And he's hardly the only reason to see this film. Shareeka Epps anchors her scenes as Drey with a self-possession way beyond her years.
Top Critic'Half Nelson': A Magnetic Ryan Gosling
Gosling and Epps, an unusual but effective pairing, show real commitment in their performances.
The movie comes down to Gosling's spot-on performance and how we feel about it.
Gosling is indeed amazing as a bewildered, depressed New York schoolteacher who is slipping into dire drug addiction; it's exactly the kind of star turn in a smaller film that Academy voters could (and should) notice.
Although the subject promises more than the film can deliver, there is compensation in Gosling's convincing, unromanticized portrayal of someone seeking escape from longing and loss that neither he nor the movie can really define.
Indie inner-city drama with drug-addict teacher.
"Half Nelson" elegantly tiptoe around its elephant in the room: Dan's most compelling instruction to not let Drey enter the drug trade is his own destruction. That point of panic turns into something approaching penance.
The filmmakers bask disingenuously in their tidy vision of border-busting healing
A sometimes subtle, sometimes bombastic (Gosling's performance ranges from brilliant to bug-eyed) parable about class, race, power, and the dialectics of family relationships.
The movie hits a stream of false notes when Dunne's students deliver oral reports on Civil Rights struggles that could only have been plagiarized. The film's ending isn't only meager, it's utterly listless.
Gosling is up for an Oscar (R) for his work in Half Nelson, and there's no question he earned the nomination.
Half Nelson trades melodrama for authenticity, cliche heroics for genuine heart, cheap cinematic parlor tricks for blessed restraint.
A half-hearted study in black and white which is well-acted but based on a script which never dares to take enough risks.
We've gotten so close to these characters (and they to each other) that we don't want to let them go.
It is, in fact, a fine piece of work: reticent, intelligent, wholly devoid of triumphalism or self-pity.
It's hardly a film which trumpets its virtues but that's part of the pleasure to be had from it. It doesn't know how good it is.
While the students first mock Marxist dialectics and notions of oppression applied to the everyday, they are eventually eagerly embracing the rebellious spirit of Attica and Allende in class presentations that provide euphoric momentum.
Looks to me like a self conscious film that thrives on its own negativity. Studied, anti-establishment, arthouse cinema that gloats over its moral superiority %u2013 which is rather ironic.
It's a thoughtful character study with Gosling simply tremendous as the functioning addict, who seems to use crack to anaesthetise him from his inability to form adult relationships.
Audience Reviews for Half Nelson
There are many interesting sideplots and some finely written characters but this story of drug-addicted teacher seems to go nowhere at times. Screenplay by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck is too fragmented and lacks mostly focus. Sure it does work just a plain character study but i myself felt that this story needed something else than only downward spiral of Gosling's Dan Dunne.
At times Half Nelson reminded me a lot of Tony Kaye's Detachment and i kept wondering that did Kaye see this film before he went and made his angst filled school-drama which also has Adrian Brody in a very same kind of role Gosling performs. There were more than just a couple of similarities between these films and they both share a improvised and lightly experimental tone when it comes to acting.
As i said Half Nelson is film with some great moments but it is too self important and too all over the place to be truly great film. As a feature debut it is kinda imressive work and it is interesting to see what director Fleck does next, but in the end this is Gosling's film not Fleck's.
Super Reviewer
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- Dan Dunne: The only constant is change.
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- Dan Dunne: One thing doesn't make a man.
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- Dan Dunne: Change moves in spirals, not circles. For example, the sun goes up and then it goes down. But everytime that happens, what do you get? You get a new day. You get a new one. When you breathe, you inhale and you exhale, but every single time that you do that you're a little bit different then the one before. We're always changing. And its important to know that there are some changes you can't control and that there are others you can.
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- Dan Dunne: The sun goes up and then it comes down, but everytime that happens what do you get? You get a new day.
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Sophisticated but somewhat hazy (existential-dialectic-liberal) look at the conflict and dis-integration of the personal and the political. Good premise, great performances, good intentions - but Half Nelson comes up a bit short storywise.
- the final scene reminded me of the one in the Graduate
.. and even if it is at times appropriate here, i still hate twitchy floaty zoomy handheld camera-work.