Dan is a history teacher at a high school. He takes up a lot of effort to present the teaching at a more unusual level, presenting it as a clash of two worldviews. One day, while taking cocaine at the locker room, he is found by his 13-year old student, Drey, who helps him recover. Drey becomes his friend. Dan tries to persuade Drey to stay away from Frank, a local drug dealer. Drey tells him a joke, and Dan uses it to impress a teacher, Isabel, who came to his apartment for dinner. Even though they have sex, the next morning, Dan is uninterested in talking to Isabel. When Drey agrees to sell Frank's drugs, she finds out one of the buyers is Dan. Soon, a new history teacher is brought for replacement. Drey arrives at Dan's apartment and helps him shave.
"Half Nelson" seems to be an antithesis to "The Simpsons" classic episode "Lisa's Substitute": while in that episode we have Sam Etic, a funny, creative teacher with wisdom, who bonds with Lisa in a genuine way, in this film, we have Dan, a teacher who is a slob, an aimless mess who doesn't know where he is going or what he is doing, whereas his bond with a 13-year old student, Drey, never quite manages to develop that much charm or compassion to begin with. And this pretty much sums up the problem of the entire film. Filmed with a shaky, hand-held camera, "Half Nelson" seems as if the whole strategy of the story wasn't that well planned out beforehand: the storyline seems to be invented or improvised on the spot, with meagre events that never connect into a purposeful whole, since many ideas lack a point later on. It is, for instance, unimaginable that a person of Dan's intellect would make such a blunder to take cocaine at the school's public locker room, instead of the safety of his own apartment. Some neat scenes appear, such as when an angry Dan throws and hits a referee with a baseball, or when he confronts Frank ("I hate to be that person, but you should stay away from Drey!"), yet, as said, there is never a genuine, believable build-up of a relation between him and Drey. And as a junkie, he is never as good of a character as if he would be if he was as wise or constructive as Sam Etic or John Keating, for instance. While realistic and authentic, the story seems empty, and the "social issue" subplot revolving around African-American drug dealers didn't save it, either.
Grade:+
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