Great condition DVD of a superbly acted charcater study of some impact. Loads of extras as well.

Sometimes people are attracted to each other because of their differences. When there's a nebulous attraction between a teacher and a young teenage child--as in the superb Half Nelson--the relationship has all the makings of confused disaster. Though there are a few uncomfortable moments when it's not obvious whether Dan (Ryan Gosling) and Drey (Shareeka Epps) might cross the line, the attraction between the pair is culled less from sexual tension than desperation. Dan is an idealistic history teacher in an inner-city school. Drey is one of his brightest students.

For both, drugs represent something that may help them escape their worlds. He takes drugs to dull his dissatisfaction with himself. She views drugs as a possible way to better her life, even though she knows her brother's foray into that trade landed him in jail. Bleakly filmed and well told, Half Nelson soars because of the immaculate acting by Gosling and Epps. With his impish smile, Gosling provides a character that is at once disarming, alluring, and pitiful. As the young girl who's already seen too much hardship in her life, Epps plays her part with just the right amount of hardened raw emotion. While the ambiguous ending may not please fans weaned on happy Hollywood finales, it's a fitting and believable close to a thought-provoking film.

DVD Description
Filmmaker commentary from writer/director Ryan Fleck and writer/editor Anna Boden
Fleck and Boden's Sundance award-winning short film "Gowanus Brooklyn", also starring Shareeka Epps
Exclusive interview with Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden
Extended Q&A with Fleck and Boden at the Everyman Cinema in London
Cast Audition Footage
Outtakes
Deleted and Extended Scenes
Photo Gallery
Trailer

Half Nelson tells the story of an idealistic young teacher Dan, unable to break his cycle of cocaine and crack abuse. Labouring under the delusion that he will finish an illustrated children's book on 'dialectics', he teaches history at a run-down innercity school. Bringing left-wing theory into his lessons on the civil rights movement, his classes comprise predominately black teenagers from a poor suburb. When he has the sobreity to give them, that is; throughout the film he is increasingly unable to function with any kind of clarity.

Early in the film he is found in a locker room cubicle high on crack by one of his students Drey, and a tacit understanding is reached between them. She, whose brother has been incarcerated from involvement in the drug trade, can see how crack is devestating her community, but is still allured by the success of 'Frank', a drug dealing "family friend". Frank gradually enrolls her in his business; drugs providing her with a potential but probably ephemeral means of escape from the squalor of her broken home. For Dan, the escape is from the burden of completing his book, and from turning his political ideals into affirmative action. His inertia and drug-addled stupour are shown in contrast to footage of highly impassioned speeches from the civil rights movement, calling on people to throw themselves down on the machinery of the system to grind it to a halt. Decades after the civil rights movement, many people in the black community are still caught up in the prison system, or denied opportunities to further themselves socially; but Dan is increasingly aware how little he can do about it. His classes on the dialectics of change through opposition, start to sound hollow when there is so little hope for his students. It sounds especially hopeless to Drey, who knows about Dan's secret drug problems, which conspire to bring them together in an unlikely union of opposites. The question of whether Dan and Drey can progress and change themselves is left open, the film ending (as many of the best do) ambiguously.

It is an interesting work marred slightly by some polemic interludes featuring Dan's students recounting key events from the civil rights movement. This is not well contextualised and doesn't add anything to the film's themes. However, there is some fine use of film style to evoke Dan's crack-induced inertia. The dislocation and emptiness of his "highs" are realised with canny editing and blurred-focus that are quesily suggestive with the minimum of post-production trickery. Dan makes a convincing lead; one can imagine Paddy Considine playing the lead role if such a film could be made in the UK. But better still, for me, is Shareeka Epps as Drey, perfect as the coy teenager growing up under a multitude of imperfect influences. Also worth a mention is the soundtrack, largley provided by Canadian post-rockers Broken Social Scene. Rather than buying the OST your money might be better spent on their stunning 2003 album 'You Forgot it in People', from which much of this film's music is taken.