The Full Nelson...

... on "Half Nelson"...

I watched the first 80 minutes of this "critically acclaimed" movie and couldn't help but wonder when awkward interactions between characters and 80's drug collapse cliches suddenly fell into the "critically acclaimed" category of film, well, critique.

The "Brando-esque" comparisions were a little much for Gosling's portrayal of Dan, the high school teacher-junkie... he likes crack... he likes cocaine... as the lead drug dealer in the film notes, he's a true "basehead"... and while the whole "scene" looks pretty "cool" when he's snorting blow and macking on two co-eds at once in the back of some dance club, I was expecting an NBC, "The More You Know," public service announcement with Phylicia Rashad to creep up like a dirty sanchez and really bring me back to reality... "Whoa, crack smoking is bad? Whew, good thing you caught me when you did Phylicia... Wow, do I feel better now."

But like my word of the day, "Half Nelson" really is half of the the full - it's a "slow burn"... and by the time you hit the 81st minute straight through to its, again, awkward yet touching conclusion, you know you've watched a kaleidoscope of Americana that shines the magnifying glass on the burning ant called the Void.


That's right - the Void. Summed up in the void of race relations (no way Katrina could happen... oh wait, it did, and centuries of inequality blasted to the front pages yet again); the void of the presidency (while I thought that side of the film was hugely "try-hard" when the first rant against Dubya was thrown out by Dan as he did blow and slow-danced with some tricked-out soccer mom, maybe that's the irony - really, this void was generational, between his family's Vietnam ties and his emptiness to anything current involving Iraq); the void of the family (Dan's telling night out at dinner with his family, all of them sloshed on wine and rum, while he rolls his eyes and grinds his teeth to the James Taylor records in the background, only to leave and dive head first into a crack house night of shit-stained sheets and cheap lingerie... a scene that also tied into his student, Dre, and her lack of a true set of support mechanisms - the facade and cliche of her family that is comprised of a nice-guy dime bagger and a mom working triple shifts); and the void of what is Now, the Present (Dan, so preoccupied with his history class, revolutionaries, and how fucked we all in this Century of 21st's... and yet, he can't pull himself away from the crack long enough to make sure his cat hasn't pulled a self-taxidermy move on his bedroom floor).

"Half Nelson" may be an incomplete film, but its message is loud and clear. The Void is Here. Now what do we do to fill it?