Half-Nelson

 

Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden

HALF-NELSON        A                                                                                                                   USA  (106 mi)  2006  d: Ryan Fleck

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop, and you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.                            —Mario Salvo, student activist and leader of the Free Speech Movement at a rally in UC-Berkeley, California after the students seized control of an administrative building on campus, 1964

Reminiscent of Jon Voight’s empathetic humaneness in Martin Ritt’s CONRACK (1974), yet also the anguished impressionistic journey in Lynne Ramsay’s MORVERN CALLAR (2002), which takes place nearly entirely inside someone’s head, this is a muddled odyssey through the present day and age, as seen through the eyes of a sympathetic white 8th grade teacher in a predominately black inner-city school in Brooklyn, who scores crack on the side and thinks he can handle the situation.  While teaching history, he asks his students to explore the two opposing forces that confront one another in determining change, as “Everything is made of opposing forces” and “turning points,” both sides fighting for what they believe is right, which he contends is the catalyst or determining factor of history.  Yet it’s also seen through the eyes of a young student in his class who actually catches him smoking crack in the bathroom, but is sympathetic and keeps her mouth shut, as her brother is in prison for selling crack, while the dealer, in a favor to the brother for not turning him in, owes her family.  An expansion of Fleck’s short film GOWANUS, BROOKLYN (2004), as it takes place in the abandoned lots and desolate streets of an ungentrified Brooklyn neighborhood near the Gowanus Canal, co-written by the director and his live-in partner Anna Boden, who also edited and produced the film, Ryan Gosling (in his first Oscar nomination) is unerringly believable as the teacher, Dan Dunne, who isn’t selling anything in the classroom except the freedom to speak one’s own mind while making their own choices, though he’s held on a tight leash by the school principal, often appearing in class in a disheveled state from his previous late night binges.  His open defiance of authority and institutions raises red flags, as he frequently veers away from the “official” curriculum, yet that’s what’s so compelling about this film, as a teacher’s moral dilemma in the classroom comes down to a struggle to do what’s right as opposed to being blindly told what to teach by an often faceless administrative entity.  And while his own choice selection is hazardous, not to mention personally destructive, this issue is not side-stepped in the film, and his deplorable behavior is a force to be reckoned with, including a drunkenly pathetic attempted rape scene, but so is his commitment to stick with these kids, to be honest and not sell them a bill of goods.  Thinking that he can write a children’s book about dialectics on the side, instead he spends all his free time getting wasted, seemingly without friends, with no stable relationships, remaining aloof and emotionally disconnected.  The title is a reference to an immobilizing wrestling hold that is difficult, if not impossible, to escape from, evoking a metaphoric sense of entrapment.  Born out of a frustration with the malaise hanging over America following 9/11 and the Iraq War, this film is about a developing friendship between an adult and a child, with each taking turns taking care of each other, avoiding any overt sexual overtones, as Shareeka Epps plays the inquisitive Drey, a 13-year old latch-key student caught between moving forces, a dead end school, a tired single mother who works too hard to have any time for her, a brother in prison, a dealer that offers money and protection, and a white teacher who, despite his personal problems, actually makes sense.  Her hesitation in exploring each world is the heart and soul of the film, as she’s remarkably appealing, tough and soft at the same time, with an open mind to finding a new way other than the route of her brother or the dealer, but she doesn’t know where to find it.  An amalgamation of race, class, idealism, and self-destruction, with a nod to the rebellious instincts yet surprising honesty of J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, the film is also about finding forgiveness.     

The always compelling Anthony Mackie plays Frank the dealer, and in the model of Coppola’s THE GODFATHER (1972), which features likeable men who kill for a living, or Craig Brewer’s HUSTLE AND FLOW (2005), which features a likeable, hard-working man who pimps for a living, Mackie has his own appeal, is soft-spoken and considerate, and doesn’t push Drey too hard while gently attempting to persuade her to take over her brother’s business, luring her deeper into his world.  When Dan sees the paternal and potentially dangerous influence, he attempts to intervene, and in an especially effective scene, he confronts Frank in front of his own home and tries to steer him away from Drey, but realizes he’s hardly the role model to be making this request, as his example is no better.  Frank, in a masterful stroke of understated psychological swagger, completely takes the air out of his sails, and therein lies the real complexity of the film.  When have drug dealers been painted with ambiguity and complexity?  And if we’re to be honest, how can we blame black dealers for being dealers, considering the bleak economic options in their ravaged communities and the lure of a lucrative lifestyle?  In fact, what drives the demand for dealers in the first place?  Who are the biggest drug consumers?  In America, it turns out to be the comfortable middle class whites, who may be in denial about the consequences of their actions, like Dan in this film, believing he can handle it, while remaining oblivious to the economic disparity between blacks and whites, and the social injustice contrasted between the races, considering who the police routinely target.  But this film places the responsibility front and center on the white middle class, on the Baby Boomers, the ones who marched against the war in Vietnam, or for voting rights in the South, the ones who supposedly offered an alternate moral view, as reflected by the black and white newsreel footage that Dan shows his kids, such as Attica, where, with the exception of the Indian massacres of the 19th century, the police assault on prison inmates and their hostages was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War, or the assassination of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected representative in the U.S, or Cesar Chavez, whose boycotts helped establish rights and benefits for migrant farm workers, or America’s CIA advocating the overthrow and assassination of a freely elected leader of Chile, Salvador Allende, replacing him with a U.S. puppet, General Augusto Pinochet, now up on war crimes charges, while Henry Kissinger expressed the U.S. view that the issue was too important to leave to the Chilean people, or Mario Savio leading the Berkeley free speech rally, with students suggesting they could help open up a crack in “the Machine.”  Why believe in a system that takes away your rights, or takes away your freedom?  While explaining to his students the ways they are oppressed by the system, that the Civil Rights movement is essentially about the injustice of the system, where protests were created to expose that unfairness and have their voices finally heard, Dan, a true child of the 60’s, one of the most misunderstood decades in the movies, makes the connection that by truthfully analyzing the problems of the past, which all of us are a part of, we might find some clues into how to solve these problems in the future.  Like disillusioned characters in a Jean Eustache film, whatever happened to this moral optimism from the 60’s, this belief that people could work together to fight against social injustice?  Everything’s become so comfortably compartmentalized now, so specialized, each looking after only their own interests, which is the modern era status quo, there’s no longer any belief that we are all in this together or that concerted action can make a difference. 

This kind of film could never be made today, where a wave of censorship and conservatism has not only swept across the country, but around the world, as corporate sponsors would never approve of overt drug use and the message that sends, completely missing the larger point of making such a daring and provocative film.  So rather than allow viewers to learn from a film like this, it’s instead tossed into the dustbin of history, like an ancient relic.  Radically departing from the cliché of historical cinematic educators who appear in the teacher savior role, this completely subverts that genre, as Dunne’s left-leaning political orientation stands in stark contrast to those seen in other teacher films, as there are no miracle transformations happening here, with kids seen sleeping in his class, or missing altogether, and no one is spared from the looming trauma of the streets, even the teacher, whose personal struggles with drug use complicate his classroom impact, yet there is a sense of triumph over adversity, with just the briefest hint of hope, choosing moral complexity over easy solutions.  Enhanced by the edgy, somewhat vacuous style, the film at times resembles an amorphous blur, yet it’s grounded in the raw vulnerability of several brilliant dramatic performances, shot on gritty 16mm, often in tight close-ups by Andrij Parekh, capturing every emotional nuance.  But identifying with the film isn’t easy, as it’s disjointed, sometimes out of focus, and the handheld camera keeps physically being knocked around a bit, so there’s a rough quality, a mood of ambiguity, with occasional eerie industrial or electronic sounds along with a psychologically probing indie soundtrack by Canada’s Broken Social Scene.  Despite the film’s unsparingly honest, near documentary style, never lapsing into cheap sentiment, it occasionally departs from naturalism, such as a noticeable scene when Drey visits her brother in prison, which takes place in perfect quiet, unlike the raucous noise that is typical of overcrowded prisons today, or when the students stare straight into the camera and repeat memorized moments in history, like similar set-up scenes in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), but it also perfectly captures the wretched state of Dan’s wasted mind when a proud parent comes up to him in a bar to thank him for his daughter’s success at Georgetown and he can’t even remember her.  Still, this accurately points out how badly we need good teachers with challenging, inquisitive minds like Dan in the public school system, despite his obvious damaged goods, as his painful honesty is heartfelt and believable, made all the more compelling because the unconventional person behind the message is so openly flawed.  Kids remember being in his class, and not the automatons pushing standardized testing that school boards would prefer, as he is not condescending, yet Dan finds it difficult to find a balance between the demons of his dark personal life and the positive outlook needed to plant the seeds of discovery and self-realization in the classroom. The power dynamic between the teacher and student is inverted in this film, as the wisdom and maturity Drey exhibits in reaching out a hand of friendship, particularly during Dan’s heavy descent into drugs, is something we don’t normally see, actually finding a connection and a chance at redemption.  Born to radical parents on a commune in Berkeley, and growing up in the same area, director Ryan Fleck shares much in common with Dan’s travails, as picking up on the residue of leftover 60’s themes comes with paying a high price for disillusionment, where the loss of that collective spirit feels so defeating, as the crushing reality is that the catastrophic circumstances that so many of these kids come from are not getting any better, despite all good intentions.  This film begins to explore finding a way out by linking some of our cultural connections to our human imperfections, by literally building a bridge of mutual tolerance.  Well worth a look, as you won’t find anything like this in theaters today.   

The film that changed my life: Ryan Fleck | Do the Right Thing  Ryan Fleck from The Guardian, April 17, 2010

The Lost Patrol

 

 

 

 

Director John Ford (right) on the set with Victor McLaglen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE LOST PATROL             B                                                                                                  USA  (73 mi)  1934  d:  John Ford     re-released in 1949 (66 mi)

Arabs are almost always easy targets in war movies. From as early as 1912, decades prior to the 1991 Gulf War, dozens of films presented allied agents and military forces—American, British, French, and more recently Israeli—obliterating Arabs. In the World War I drama The Lost Patrol (1934), a brave British sergeant (Victor McLaglen) guns down “sneaky Arabs, those dirty, filthy swine.”

—Jack G. Shaheen, 2003, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People 

Easily overshadowed by David Lean’s epic spectacle in the desert, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962), John Ford decades earlier took a stab at what in hindsight looks like a mission of pure human folly, sending a British expedition into the blazing heat of the desert during WWI on some utterly senseless cavalry campaign, where they quickly realized they were lost in the ever-expanding horizon of endless sand dunes, assigned to some unknown mission that remained a mystery to them all, finding themselves literally alone in the middle of nowhere as the baking sun was about to take the last living breath out of the men and their horses.  Shot in the Yuma Desert of Arizona, with desert images reminiscent to von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), where the labyrinthian landscape is a human death trap, as so many of those that enter never find their way back out.  While it’s easy to get lost in any historical account of the British colonial involvement, which is all but absent in this picture, recounting instead the misadventures of a small British patrol of a dozen men during the WWI Mesopotamia campaign (Iraq, for all practical purposes, which didn’t yet exist as a nation), the film is meant to be metaphorical instead of historical, creating a mythical universe depicting the madness of war, as one by one this small renegade group is picked off by unseen snipers lurking just over the horizon, creating a psychological panic and interior hysteria among the men, who have no defense for this kind of guerilla war, where at no time in the film is there any motivation provided for just why they are at war or coming under attack, as it appears they are acting upon their own projected hatred.  Adapted by Garrett Fort from the 1927 war novel Patrol by Philip MacDonald, the film is a remake of a 1929 silent British film by Walter Summers under the same title, which happened to star Cyril McLaglen, the younger brother of Victor McLaglen, both playing the same role.  Written by Dudley Nichols, his initial experience as Ford’s screenwriter, working on 16 productions together before having a falling out, where he went on to direct Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), but this is a production that excludes women, that reveals the casual conversations that take place among the men, including references to home, and the dysfunctional lives many of these men lead, viewed as outcasts, which led them to sign up for military experience, sent to British territories around the globe, recalling former campaigns, where we hear the exaggerated sagas of former experiences that have been embellished through the years.  Finding themselves in the hot Mesopotamian desert, aptly described in the opening intertitles as a desert “that seemed on fire with the sun.  The molten sky gloated over them.  The endless desert wore the blank look of death,” surrounded by an unseen enemy that strikes like ghosts, as a shot rings out and the commanding officer falls to his death without ever revealing his regiment’s objective or their final destination.  A gutty Sergeant takes command, Victor McLaglen, an ex-boxer who fought against heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, becoming the heavyweight champion of the British Army, a big burly presence whose calm demeanor helps stabilize the troops, having been through it all before, who would win the Best Actor Oscar the very next year for his role in Ford’s The Informer (1935), working together in a dozen pictures, perhaps the most recognizable John Ford actor after John Wayne.   

A reflection of the British class system, where WWI was an attempt to protect a dying aristocracy, the remaining soldiers show little remorse for their fallen officer, coming from a distinctly different social class than the rank and file.  As the film was released during the Depression, largely viewed as a disaster caused by the super wealthy inflicting their incompetency upon the poor, giving the film an allegorical message about the rich refusing to share the wealth with the common man.  Lean and concise, perhaps a predecessor to films like Delmar Daves’ 3:10 TO YUMA (1957), André de Toth’s Day of the Outlaw (1959), Robert Aldrich’s FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX (1965), John Carpenter’s ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976), or Ridley Scott’s outer space sci-fi saga Alien (1979), the oppressive desert heat leaves the men weakened and exhausted, with little water left to share, while their horses are under the same strain, with some falling by the wayside.  By some miracle, they fall upon an oasis, providing water and fig trees, literally a lifesaver in what is otherwise a death march into a pit of Hell.  While the men are euphoric, recovering quickly, Reginald Denny is Brown, an experienced veteran who boasts of adventures in faraway places, like the Malayan Islands, which has a casual air of racism when they mention the skin color of the girls, as if that’s tainted goods, yet it makes no difference to men who are so far away from home.  A small group of isolated men under stress speaking that all-too familiar Irish brogue, where the stories resemble the talk along the ship decks in The Long Voyage Home (1940), among many Ford films built around a distant journey, though often the object of the journey is never attained, like a mythical quest for the Golden Fleece, or immortality.  A young inexperienced soldier Pearson (Douglas Walton) talks about living with his mother at home, but having no future, so he signed up for military service hoping to gain some experience, driven by heavily romanticized Kipling-inspired dreams of glory that preached the benefits of British imperialism, but by morning he’s shot dead by a sniper, while all their horses were also stolen right out from underneath them, leaving them stranded out in the open like sitting ducks.  Boris Karloff is Sanders, a Bible-toting religious fanatic who initially claims the oasis is a Garden of Eden (though clearly the land is Islamic territory), but he never joins in with the others, always keeping to himself, annoyed that his attempts at conversion fail, viewing the others as heathens and scoundrels for failing to follow the Word of the Lord, perhaps viewing this military venture into the land of infidels as a religious crusade.  He grows more maniacal as the men are picked off one by one, where the mystifying tone of the film is charged by the eerie silence that surrounds them, where no movement is ever seen, with the sand dunes concealing the face of the enemy.  Like Zurlini’s THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS (1976), the men are haunted by a lurking dread of an impending sense of doom, exacerbated by the fear of the unknown, psychologically projecting their own fears into the actions of the enemy, which eats at the inner core of these soldiers who live in a world abandoned by time.  Certainly a study of questionable leadership, the Sergeant is perplexed right from the outset at never being told the mission, allowing behavior that has disastrous consequences, like allowing the most inexperienced soldier sentry duty the first night, or allowing another to climb the highest tree, where he’s immediately picked off, while others panic and run out into the open desert, as if blinded by temporary insanity, but it costs them their lives, with a militaristic score by Max Steiner heightening the emotional impact, his first (out of 24!) Oscar nominated score.

This film is shrouded in a Macbethian gloom of paranoid delusion, countering the imperialist myth that war is glorious, growing progressively dark as the body count grows, becoming a staunchly anti-war fable.  The fact that it all takes place in such an artificialized environment that couldn’t be more remotely isolated, stuck in a state of paralysis, not knowing where they are or how they got there, or even where they’re going, giving this a staged theater of the absurd appearance with characters trapped in a modernist No Exit situation, allowing Sanders in particular to go off on the deep end, losing himself in his zealous fanaticism, shouting at one point, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.”  Another internal conflict is existentialism against religious faith, with a grandstanding Boris Karloff pouring out the over-the-top melodrama as he expounds upon religious conviction, yet his obsession with holding the Bible near and dear to him in times of trouble feels as much like a crutch as the escapist, immoral tales told by ordinary men, whose drinking exploits and carnal desires are called upon in times of stress, if only to help alleviate the fear that engulfs them.  A primal tale of survival against implacable forces, a complete breakdown of moral order, growing ever more isolated and alone in their internalized sense of desperation, veering towards a horror film.  As the men bicker among themselves, their group dwindles in dramatic fashion, becoming panicked, held together by a primal desire to kill as many Arabs as possible, aligned in their mad desire for revenge, but what the men lack is faith in one another and faith in their mission, instead feeling stranded, as if left on a deserted island, where the only surety is that no one will be coming to rescue them, perfectly capturing a mood of bleak fatalism.  By the way, the solemn final image was borrowed by Akira Kurosawa for the conclusion of SEVEN SAMURAI (1954).  Even this early in Ford’s career, showing progressive moral values, the racial element is an unmistakable component to his filmmaking, where Arabs are a stand-in for what will become the Indians, as a non-white enemy is perpetually demonized, viewed as less than human, with the director expressing no interest in exploring or expounding upon their character, yet they are continually dehumanized as evil.  This vein of bigotry exists throughout his legendary career, and this film is no different.  In Hollywood, the celluloid mythology dominates the culture, becoming the predominate train of thought, a stand-in for truth that literally infects generation after generation.  In less than a decade, 100,000 Japanese-Americans would be sent to internment camps, American blacks would march off to war but were denied basic civil rights back here at home, while hate groups like the Klu Klux Klan were still burning homes and organizing lynchings, while also resorting to murder.  Earlier in history, American Indians were slaughtered and displaced.  Certainly part of the problem is the Hollywood depiction, as the mythology of Arabs and Indians are still rooted in evil, where this kind of racist hysteria becomes the norm.  These all-pervasive stereotypes have more of an effect on viewers today than they did during the Depression, for instance, when this film was released, as the motion picture industry has extended their influence into mainstream culture.  Even without revealing the face of the enemy, it’s hard not to view Arabs as threatening after watching this film.  Perhaps more importantly, the television and motion picture industry of today perpetuates the same threat, as Arab-Americans are nearly entirely non-existent except when depicted as villains, where they are routinely stereotyped as “terrorists.” 

Note

The film was reportedly a favorite of Peanuts creator Charles Schultz in his youth, which may be the reason Snoopy’s cousin Spike lives in the desert.