By Steve Vineberg
Ryan Gosling is one of the handsomest leading men to come up in the last five years, but as an actor he doesn’t appear to have any vanity. (If he did, presumably he would have chosen a more graceful professional name.) There’s nothing self-protective about the way he plays Dan Dunne, the crack-addicted high school history teacher and basketball coach in the new movie Half Nelson. It’s a down-and-dirty performance. At one point Dan tells his ex-girlfriend, Rachel (Tina Holmes)—they grew apart when she made it through rehab and he didn’t, and now, back in the old neighborhood to visit her ailing mother, she lets him know she’s engaged to someone else—that he’s still an asshole, and he often is. He maintains a junkie’s remoteness from his family, even when he spends time with them; his latest relationship, with a fellow teacher (Monique Curnen), is mostly opportunistic—a chance for sex, with no emotional follow-through—and he behaves so insensitively to her that she slugs him and retreats to her bedroom until he’s cleared off. Gosling doesn’t try to make Dan lovable; when he turns off the people who care about him—usually with a long-distance stare or a delayed, faraway reply—the actor doesn’t peek through with a reassurance that he’s really a good guy who’s just operating at diminished capacity. We have to judge his potential for salvation in his moments of consciousness (as we did, for instance, with Michael Keaton’s doper in Clean and Sober)—and in his interaction with his students, who are all African American and who respond easily to his hipster humor and his obvious delight in their street wit and his efforts to find a way to make history meaningful to them. (He starts by acknowledging that they hate coming to this tough Brooklyn school—or at least, that they’d never admit they didn’t—and then rides over their renegade pose by sparking their interest.) He’s a gifted teacher, when he’s not too distracted or hung over to turn the key in his own ignition.
The key to Gosling’s performance—which is, I think, amazing—is the way he balances Dan’s engagement and disengagement. He alternates druggy, deep-interior rhythms with the balls-of-his-feet, ricocheting rhythms of a basketball player, feinting and bounding. There’s a sorrowful scene in the movie where the father of one of his former students sees him drinking in a bar and heads over to say hello. The man is eager to tell him that his daughter is majoring in history at Georgetown and to thank Dan for inspiring her, but Dan’s so stoned that he can’t place the girl’s name; he just echoes it foggily. You know, from what you’ve seen of him in the classroom—and from the friendship that’s grown up, awkwardly, between him and one of his students (who also plays on his team), a wiry African-American girl named Drey (Shareeka Epps)—that he must have cared deeply about this man’s daughter, but he doesn’t have the wherewithal at the moment to hook up with whatever he felt for her when she was his student. And there are times when he deflects Drey’s attempts to get closer. Drey’s older brother is in jail for peddling dope; the man he ran for, Frank (Anthony Mackie), who sells crack to Dan, warns her to stay away from him because “he’s a basehead, and baseheads got no friends.” The arc of Dan’s character is his disproving Frank’s analysis—despite his own lack of faith in his own ability to stay connected to anything outside drugs. In his own words, he has to fight his tendency to behave like an asshole.
There isn’t much of a movie around Gosling, Mackie, and Epps, a fine young actress with a talent for being open and guarded at the same time. The script by Anna Boden and director Ryan Fleck sets up the basic irony—that a crack dealer and a crack addict are in competition for the loyalty—the soul, really—of an impressionable ghetto kid. (If there’s any moral ambiguity about which way she should be leaning, when Frank tempts her to run deliveries for him the screenwriters tip their hand. The movie doesn’t really rise above melodrama.) But they don’t provide the kind of dialogue that fills in the characters. When Dan begs Frank to stay away from Drey for her own good, and Frank, indignant, asks him if he thinks he’s in a moral position to make that demand, the best Boden and Fleck can do is to have Dan repeat several times, “I—don’t—know!”; it’s the intensity of Gosling’s reading, and the layers of anguish and self-doubt he supplies, that carry the scene. And Fleck is a clumsy director; he not only lacks technique—he lacks basic skill. The camera is almost never in the right place; sometimes you have to squint and crane your neck to see what exactly is going on, the way you do in a small theater when the patron in front of you keeps shifting his head. Drey finds out about Dan’s habit not from Frank but from her own observations; after a basketball game one day, she wanders into the locker room and finds him high, with a pipe clenched in his fist. This scene of odd, unplanned-for intimacy, where the adult and the child switch roles—he asks her for a wet paper towel for his face, and gets her to stay with him until he can regain some balance—is so beautifully acted by both Gosling and Epps that the terrible camerawork feels like an insult.
On the other hand, except for the narrative contrivances (one sets up the crucial scene where Drey—whose own father is even less of a presence than her jailed brother—chooses between the two strong male influences in her life), the filmmakers try hard to maintain naturalism. That is, Fleck does—he has an authentic touch with the actors, including Collins Pennie and Karen Chilton as Drey’s brother and her mother, a hard-working paramedic, and the stage actor Denis O’Hare as a colleague of Dan’s whose ironic style masks real concern for his well-being. The only sequence that feels phony is the one where Dan has dinner with his family and we’re cued to see his alcoholic parents (Deborah Rush and Jay O. Sanders) as the sources of his drug problem. The rest of the acting bears the hallmark of truth, especially that of the three principals, and that’s why Half Nelson, for all its glaring faults, tends to stay with you. You can do a lot worse than spend a couple of hours watching Ryan Gosling burrow his way inside the white-hot skin of Danny Dunne.
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Big Boi and friends in 'Idlewild'
The Prohibition-set African-American gangster musical Idlewild, written and directed by Bryan Barker, with songs by the hip-hop artists Outkast and starring that duo, André Benjamin (André 3000) and Antwan Patton (Big Boi), is a fiasco. But it doesn’t make you cringe or turn away in embarrassment as other recent musicals have: De-Lovely, Beyond the Sea, The Phantom of the Opera, Rent. Barker has talent but lacks the kind of skill you need to realize ambitions as big as his, and though he’s bursting with ideas, for every good one he comes up with there are 10 or 12 you wish he’d killed at the drawing board.
The movie is so distracted it’s exhausting. Rooster (Patton), who inherits a speakeasy called The Church in the southern city of Idlewild when his boss and mentor, Ace (Faizon Love) gets shot, has a fight with his wife Zora (Malinda Williams) when she catches him talking up a pair of showgirls, but one fight isn’t enough for Barker; he has to intercut it with a scene where Rooster’s pal Percival (Benjamin), the piano player at The Church, quarrels with his father (Ben Vereen), who wants to keep him in the family undertaking business and away from The Church’s latest attraction, a singer named Angel (Paula Patton). The two scenes aren’t connected, and they don’t bring anything out in each other; it’s like trying to watch two TV sets at the same time, tuned to different channels. A number begins, sung by Macy Gray, that foggy-voiced embodiment of sass, leading a band of long-legged chorines, and you settle in to enjoy her and the Hinton Battle choreography, but you find you can’t, because Barker keeps cutting away and the soundtrack mix is so chaotic we can’t make out the lyrics amid the din of the customers.
The staging and design, impressive as they are, are absurdly extravagant for the context. Barker wants to do The Blue Angel and Busby Berkeley and Cabaret in a black honky-tonk setting—and, following Baz Lurhmann’s coup in Moulin Rouge, with anachronistic music. What he’s mostly inherited from Lurhmann is his ADD style of direction (which was equally in evidence in his Broadway staging of La Bohème). The difference is that when the images in Moulin Rouge rush by or pile up, none of them seems compelling enough for you to want to slow down the breakneck parade. The frustration of Idlewild is that you feel sure that if Barker could pare away four-fifths of what he’s got going at the same time, he’d have something worth lingering on.
The women, for example. In addition to Gray and Williams (who has an exquisite face and figure and a steam-heat presence) and Paula Patton, Barker has cast Paula Jai Parker from Hustle & Flow as Rose, the platinum-blonde knockout who belongs to Ace but whom Rooster dallies with in the back of a car. If Williams is built for speed, to quote the old Billie Holiday song, Parker is built for power, and she has perhaps the sexiest honky-tonky style since Mae West in the early thirties, so you can’t understand why Barker doesn’t want to do more with her or at least keep his camera trained on her a little longer. He does more with Paula Patton. She gets a big duet with Benjamin, whose Percival persuades her to learn a new song he wants to introduce at the club. Understandably, they can’t get the attention of the speakeasy patrons at first, because it’s a bebop ballad, some twenty years before anyone thought to write one, but let that go. It’s a good song, they perform it well, and Barker mostly curbs his tendency to wander away from his subject or layer so many other things on top of it that you lose track of what you’re supposed to be looking at. The conceit of the number is familiar, of course—from Show Boat and Funny Girl and Lady Sings the Blues and the Streisand-Kristofferson A Star Is Born and lots of other backstage musicals: It’s the moment when the novice overcomes the initial hostility or disengagement of the crowd and shows off her gifts. It almost always works, and it does here. But Paula Patton is the only one of the stunning actresses in the cast who gets the break she deserves—with one exception: Cicely Tyson shows up in one scene, as a grandmother on the road with her family who’s waiting for God to tell her how to keep them from starvation, and she’s truly great, in the way that Lillian Gish could be in her best older roles (The Night of the Hunter, TV’s A Trip to Bountiful).
Barker can be inventive and playful: A number involving Percival and a wall full of elaborate alarm clocks with figures carved on them is an enchantment, and every time Rooster pulls out his hip flask and Barker animates the rooster on it (its craggy falsetto voice is supplied by Farnsworth Bentley), the effect is disarming. But he’s addicted to clichés. I didn’t mind the one about the chorus girl who pretends to be a big star (Angel has stolen the name of a headliner, briefly played by Patti LaBelle, and shown up in her place to take the job at The Church), but I couldn’t believe the ones that go back beyond old Hollywood to 19th-century melodrama: the unyielding Victorian papa last seen in The Jazz Singer, the pure soul who stops a bullet meant for the man she loves. And the gangland violence has that overscaled, meant-to-be-mythic quality you find in the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino and Sam Mendes’ The Road to Perdition—bullets that create holes in walls big enough for the smoky light to pour through and so on. I can accept the interpolation of bebop and hip-hop into this setting more easily than the way Barker mixes in these new American-movie clichés with the older ones. Terrence Howard is an electrifying performer, but his sadistic sociopath Trumpy is too modern a creation for this milieu. He rubs out both Ace and the bootlegger Spats (Ving Rhames) while Rooster is screwing Rose in the back seat of Ace’s car—a scenario that sets up all the misplaced over-the-top gun battling that ensues.
Benjamin is a good-looking fellow but a bit dull as an actor (I thought so when I saw him last year in Four Brothers), and the fatuous Vandyke he sports here doesn’t help him. Antwan Patton is livelier, but only when he sneaks around and plays the trickster; when he has to play it straight, he becomes a hole in the screen. And for my money he’s outclassed by Bobb’e J. Thompson, who plays him as a fast-talking boy in the opening montage. The lightning-streak con man ends up the hero of the movie, but at the cost of his charm. Barker just doesn’t seem to know when he’s got hold of a good thing.
Steve Vineberg teaches theater history, dramatic literature, and film at College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of three books: High Comedy in American Movies: Class and Humor from the 1920s to the Present (2005), No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade (1992), and Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style (winner of the Joe A. Calloway Prize for Best Book in Drama, 1991). He writes regularly on movies and theater in The Boston Phoenix, The Threepenny Review, The Christian Century and The Perfect Vision, and has also been published in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Pakn Treger, The Oxford American, Sight and Sound, American Film, Film Quarterly, and other publications.
