Blog #2: "What I See: Half Nelson"

I viewed the 2006 low budget ($700,000) but critically acclaimed independent film “Half Nelson”. It was the directorial debut of Ryan Fleck and featured Ryan Gosling. It is set in a seedy, non-gentrified area of Brooklyn and involves the relationship between a drug-addicted junior high school history teacher and a 13-year-old African-American girl on the basketball team that he coaches.

 

The director and cinematographer create a particular mood with their technical choices. The use of extreme close-ups, jerky hand-held camera movement and off-centered framing, coupled with low light and grainy washed-out imagery, helped create a sense of a hazy, drug centered life; disoriented, bleak, claustrophobic and colorless. This is perfectly executed in a scene where the teacher is smoking crack in a bathroom stall in the girl’s gym after a game. The close-up focus on his face goes from sharp to blurry as he inhales and exhales, mirroring what’s happening in his brain and vision. When one of the girls comes in to use the stall next to his he has to hide. The oppressively tight camera angles created a perfect sense of being trapped as you hold your breath with him. The use of rack focus is illustrated when she opens the stall door and focus goes from his face to his hands holding the pipe, following her discovery. Moody music, used almost exclusively when he’s high, contributes to the feeling of his isolation from the world.

Half Nelson is a wrestling hold almost impossible to break free from and an apt title.