#4“Half Nelson”

In the movies, and unfortunately in life, we tend to accept the easy falsehood that someone who behaves badly in one respect must be bad in others, even if they’re totally unrelated. So, if a person is a gambler, he must be a drunk. If he’s a pedophile, he must be a murderer. If he’s a cigarette smoker (in the movies, at least), he must be corrupt conspirator of some kind.

In a black-and-white world, human flaws are not allowed. In order to do good, a person must himself be a paragon of goodness. “Half Nelson,” the miraculous movie by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, is about a junior high schoolteacher who smokes. Crack. And the thing is, he’s a good teacher, even if (or, rather, because) he doesn’t always stick to the district-approved syllabus.

Dan (Ryan Gosling) wakes up on the hardwood floor of his apartment in an open short-sleeved shirt and white jockey shorts. And then he somehow gets himself to work, dragging himself up the stairs like an escapee from a George Romero movie. He’s wan and thin, and his bruised blue eyes look like they could roll back in his head at any minute. But once he gets started talking about the dialectics of power and world politics, he comes alive. Back in the teachers’ lounge, or alone in his car, for lunch, he’s halfway back to the realm of the undead again.