Half Nelson

In some ways, Half Nelson, the first full-length narrative feature from writer-director team Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, is a relic of the Bush years, a film that openly discusses radical politics and dares to show a crack addict who is *gasp* a nice and decent person. But to write off the film as nothing more than a subtle rebellion at the black-and-white faux morality of the Bush administration would ignore a larger social application, one that has already survived the last president and shows no sign of losing its relevance.

The crack addict in question is Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), history teacher and basketball coach for an inner-city high school. Every day, he musters up the dedication to bring out some measure of scholastic enthusiasm out of students who typically sleep or talk among themselves. He has the audacity to treat students as equals, maintaining a clear teacher-student relationship while allowing these kids to approach him like they might one of their friends. His class subjects generally involve radical (and racial) politics stretching from the 1860s Civil War to the 1960s Civil Rights and into the '70s; in between some scenes, Fleck and Boden cut to brief clips of students addressing the camera, discussing various moments of social and racial protest in history as news footage of the events plays over their proud recitations of retained knowledge.

How could such a good, beloved teacher be a crackhead? We've been conditioned, even by "indie" films, to accept characters at face value and that certain traits are simply incompatible. But there's no denying that his teaching is effective and his enthusiasm infectious, even if he uses his free time after a basketball game to smoke in the girl's bathroom. At this stage we meet the second major player of Half Nelson, Drey (Shareeka Epps), a 13-year-old who discovers a zonked-out Dunne in the stall.

Half Nelson has all the trappings of a self-absorbed stab at social consciousness and indie appeal -- a teacher trying to impart a typically dull subject unto disaffected urban youth, hand-held "realism," a child wise beyond her years -- but it never once lapses into the realm of the ordinary and tired. Epps, 17 at the time, is believable as a younger teen, albeit one forced to mature faster than most: her deadbeat father is never around and her brother is in jail, but the mother has learned from her experiences and now works as an EMT. Though the mother has overcome her own problems, her rebirth leaves the daughter alone, vulnerable to the forces around her that have not dissipated simply because Drey's mom turned her life around. Chief among these destructive influences is Frank (Anthony Mackie), a drug dealer for whom Drey's brother worked before his arrest for selling.

What's truly remarkable and, tragically, original about these characters is that we are allowed to like or at least understand the appeal of all three. Frank is not an evil, vicious dealer, and he's just as kind and supportive of Drey as Dan; when she exerts the self-control not to beat a kid for stealing her bike, Frank's confusion at her leniency is matched by a certain sense of parental pride in her judgment. But he also pushes her toward the life that sent her brother to prison, a life that holds its immediate pleasures for Drey but never overwhelms her common sense and her knowledge of where the life will end. On the other side of the struggle for Drey's future is Dan, who fully understands the irony of a crack addict attempting to sort out someone else's life but decides to help anyway. Dan's family life is almost as turbulent as Drey's, swapping out working-class concerns for middle-class pressures. His girlfriend enables his addiction, and drugs stunt his emotional growth: characters often ask him about that book he was writing, only for him to deflect the questions. When he finds himself in the nightmare of a family reunion, his father asks him if he's "still teaching ebonics down at that zoo." For all the maturity and wisdom he displays in the classroom, at home Dan is just as confused and immature as his student compatriot.

In his classes, Dan teaches dialectics, his students throwing out examples like "right and left" and "teacher and student" to prove they understand him. But the entire thrust of Half Nelson is that life does not conform to either/or situations; shortly before engaging in a coke binge, Dan rages against the vast percentage of Americans who bought the lie of Saddam's connection to Al-Qaeda and who believed even by '06 that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but the film's true political statement is that Bush's black-and-white morality, his literal proclamation of "You're either with us or against us" was nothing but a load of bullshit crammed down our throats to exploit a tragedy for political loyalty.

Watching the film now, however, one could draw interesting comparisons with Lee Daniels' absurdly overrated Oscar vehicle Precious. Daniels' film depicted an ignorant, hopeless young woman set on a path of questionable redemption by a dedicated teacher. Drey, through Epps' sure-footed performance, is, for all her vulnerability, anything but a mindless weakling. She knows exactly what could happen to her at this crossroads, but because the answers in this movie are not so clear she does not know which direction to take. Her teacher does not light the way, because he is stuck in a similar situation; in this film, the student and the teacher genuinely do enrich each other's lives, more capable of steering the other through the fog than themselves.

In Precious, the protagonist suffers numerous atrocities, but her greatest suffering, as subtly and horrifically implied by the script and direction, concerns her race. But the races of the white teacher and black student here are simply another meaningless dialectic that distracts from the full complexity of life. Mackie and Gosling are magnetic, capable of adding depth and pathos to their characters simply through their charisma. They would each command any other film with their performances, but here they act as the angels and demons on the shoulders of the true protagonist, Drey. That we can never be sure which character is the angel and which is the demon speaks to the elliptical, ambiguous genius of Fleck and Boden's script. Epps gives one of the great performances by a young actor, regarding the world with a steely glance that awaits the worst yet still capable of feeling and acting like a kid; some of the film's most memorable scenes involve her trading the most groan-worthy knock-knock jokes ever conceived with Dan.

Half Nelson treats all of its characters -- black, white, adult, child -- with respect and maturity, allowing us to empathize with and accept these characters as real even as the directors use purely cinematic methods of juxtaposition and contrast. When it reaches its ambiguous ending, both hopeful and a bit deflated, the film forms its own dialectic with its socially conscious peers: between exploitative, "feel good to feel bad" awards bait and honest, thought-provoking filmmaking. What a shame it is that so few movies fall on the side of the latter.

Sugar

The first thing that you can take away from Sugar, whether you like it or not, is that the face of baseball really has changed. America's "national pastime," the biggest names in the game now are Japanese, or Puerto Rican. Of these This of course has been the case for over a decade, but American cinema has finally gotten around to addressing this shift. Sugar is a wonderful combination of the sport film and the "Immigrant looking for the American Dream" genres, one that traces the biggest stars back to their hometowns, where baseball is more a way a life than any American city I've ever visited.

The film's titular character, né Miguel Santos (Algenis Perez Soto), is a pitcher trying out with dozens of other hopefuls at a camp where American scouts come to pinch the next major player. The competition is fierce, but the famial closeness of the community spawn friendly bonds. During breaks, the players all joke with one another and trade innocent insults. The camp also offers English lessons, in which the teachers hilariously teach them phrases that an American star would have to know to deal with sports reporters. "It must be my mechanic," they repeat when asked a hypothetical question criticizing their performance on the field.

The whole experience seems like an adult version of the baseball camp I went to as a kid, but there's a darker edge running underneath it. For Sugar and many of the other players, making the big leagues, or even the minors, is a pathway out of poverty. The effect of Sugar leaving that pristine, well-kept baseball academy -- one that looks indistinguishable from any American field -- and stepping into urban squalor is truly jarring. Miguel grew up in the shadow of the field, a place that might as well be magical, for it launches a lucky few into a fairy tale life of luxury and fame. He's clearly the best player there (and he has the ego to prove it), and soon a scout snatches him up and signs him up to play for the Swing in Iowa.

Sugar sets its protagonists on a slow journey to the top but, as with so many great genre films, the genre aspect of the film isn't half as interesting as what it's saying. Miguel must leave his family for the first time to go to America, hoping that success will allow him to bring them to the States with him. But the minor leagues offer not packed stadiums but sparsely populated fields; the games he plays in Iowa have more a high school game turnout than one for paid professionals. His difficulty with English is a constant setback, only furthering his sense of alienation from this strange new world. The elderly, baseball-loving family that takes him in is kind, but writer-director team Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck stumble a bit by telling us that this couple have housed numerous up-and-comers from Spanish-speaking countries, yet they don't know a word. He grows attracted to a sweet, pretty young lady in town, but she ultimately rejects him.

That rejection, coupled with his feelings of isolation, are exacerbated when his friend Jorge (Rayniel Rufino), the only other Dominican on the team and his biggest source of help in interacting with Americans, is dropped from the roster after a devastating knee injury. An injury of Miguel's own sidelines his playing, and before he can recover an old peer, Salvador, rises up from the Dominican Republic as Miguel's game worsens. At last, he takes a bus to New York to seek out his friend, as well as to give the American Dream one last shot (because where else to fulfill it than New York?).

Boden and Fleck created the much-lauded Half Nelson, and their deft hand at characterization informs Sugar as well. But as directors they still have some growing to do. The film is based upon the slow evolution of Miguel's plight in America, which the writing paces perfectly, but too many scenes simply come to a halt before another one starts because the filmmakers didn't know how to transition between them. Bits like the foster family-like elders not bothering to learn any Spanish in the years that they've housed foreign players are clearly meant to establish the mood, yet it just smacks of lazy writing when those characters needn't have been set up in a way that betrayed such a glaring flaw.

Nevertheless, watching the film, I was reminded both of Herzog's Stroszek -- there are plenty of other immigrant movies this can conjure, but I tend to have Herzog on the brain anyway -- and Steve James' documentary Hoop Dreams. Boden and Fleck subtly and wonderfully contrast the effect baseball has on the poverty-stricken Dominican community and the rural town in Iowa, gently bringing out the way these people truly need baseball in their lives. A sports film typically ends in triumph or in the cold rejection of fame's false promise. Amazingly, Sugar ends in an entirely different way: Boden and Fleck do not fall into the facile trap of the Hollywood ending, but they don't run in the other direction just to be edgy. No, there's a touching optimism in its ending that manages to consolidate the character's numerous setbacks into a faint glimmer of hope and happiness.