Half-hearted

The infuriating Half Nelson has the additional misfortune of being the third addict-in-crisis film I've screened in four months. While its Sundancing isn't as self-congratulatory as Sherrybaby's, no way does it touch Oliver Assayas' Clean, whose mercilessly straightforward narrative and demotic manner has still convinced a lot of critics that it's ho-hum. Like most films by new American directors, Half Nelson can't approach its subject without sensationalizing it, whether by slathering a obtrusively ambient soundtrack or employing the tackiest cross-cutting in a sex scene since Monster's Ball. Politics are a carapace behind which the filmmakers retreat from engagement and irony; at any rate the references to Gandhi, the Duelfer report, and clips of the Attica riots remind us of a real world in which these people and events had not-so-subtle efects, and it's beyond the filmmakers' grasp to remind us of how young dummy Ryan Gosling may have once articulated his not-dumb views (when Gosling's Dan emphasizes the importance of dialectics in history to his blank junior high students, I wondered whether the filmmakers meant dianetics). I had no idea how the audience was supposed to react to the complacency of Dan's liberal family, getting drunk on red wine after a cheerful dinner like the gruesome ex-hippies in Running on Empty, mourning the collapse of their ideals (we actually get such a scene between Dan and his mother in which she muses aloud, like a Joan Didion character, and Dan rightfully looks like he's about to blow snot on her).

According to Half Nelson, if you're a crack addict you don't read, call your girlfriend, or affect sincerity when your co-workers make conversation. I've known several habitual coke users, none of whom possessed a gram of Dan's privilege, with more winning personalities. Only a student understands him, but no wisdom pours out of the mouth of this babe, only a gaze that could freeze an Eskimo. Gosling's rapport with Shareeka Epps is Half Nelson's biggest strength: the scene in which she uncovers his secret, with Gosling's fake non-chalance crashing against her fake outrage, should be shown on Oscar night. Gosling himself has a loose, mocking/self-mocking defiance that deserves a better outlet. Scenes with Epps suggest that the filmmakers dampened his considerable sexual charisma for fear of – what? Half Nelson's racial politics are screwy enough.