1.78:1 DVD capture: Half Nelson The DVD

Sony ushers Half Nelson to DVD in a 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer presumably sourced from the 2K digital intermediate. The film was shot in Super16 and, given its subject matter, bears the unfortunate patina of an Afterschool Special on the small screen. It's grainy as hell, in other words, and muted and soft-focused; to single out any perceived flaws is to preach to the converted, however, as they're clearly a by-product of the microbudget coupled with banal aesthetic choices. And considering all that grain, the compression is immaculate, with nary a hint of edge-enhancement to boot. The accompanying Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is similarly low-aspiring, though the filmmakers reward the generous participation of Broken Social Scene by providing their music a diaphanous five-channel platform. On another track, find a feature-length commentary with screenwriter Anna Boden and director Ryan Fleck, whose obvious 'colour blindness' (both are Caucasian) is often closer to colour obliviousness: they don't seem to realize, for instance, that they've made a movie that ends on an ostensibly uplifting note with a little black girl becoming her white teacher's housekeeper. Perhaps because I just didn't care for this picture, virtually everything that came out of their mouths sounded unctuous to me (and do we really need the titular metaphor explained for us? Frankly, I was even less convinced of its applicability after Boden's garbled exegesis), but your mileage may vary, particularly if you're an aspiring filmmaker looking for tales from the trenches. Under Special Features, a 7-minute slab of outtakes (just as there's nothing quite so electric as great improv, there's nothing quite so insufferable as bad improv) joins three wisely-deleted scenes, the most persuasive of which sees Mr. Halfnelson growing increasingly paranoid as Drey whispers secrets in her classmate's ear the day after she catches him smoking crack in the locker room. There are likewise five extended scenes whose deviations from the final product are nigh imperceptible, except where the absence of a memorable ad-lib involving a stray cat is concerned. An unintentionally funny tie-in video for Rhymefest's "Wanted" plus startup trailers for Dreamland, American Hardcore, and Running with Scissors round out the disc.-

With pretensions to be something meaningful, Half Nelson is another movie anchored by a mad Method performance by an insane character actor (this time Ryan Gosling, the new Ed Norton). It talks about Harvey Milk and the Communist Manifesto and the Civil Rights Movement and the CIA installation of Pinochet and the madness of a majority that still believes there were weapons of mass destruction in an Iraq...and it does so as backdrop to the disintegration of privileged white boy Dan (Gosling), a teacher at a rough inner-city school nursing a crack habit. Until it gets too obvious about itself (somewhere around the halfway mark (like an addict nursing a jones, as it happens)), that sense of futile outrage at the fruitlessness of trying to affect change in a world that has never been more informed yet remains incapable of avoiding (recent) history's harshest lessons lends a nice feeling of indignity to what is already a pretty fair genre inversion.

I have to admit to feeling dismay when I heard we were in for another white teacher/black student piece, but Half Nelson manages to sidestep the standing-on-desks bullshit, replacing it with something that feels like The Big Chill in its throwback to good old-fashioned Flower Power outrage. (In its way, it's a nice, unexpected, companion piece to this year's V for Vendetta.) Name-dropping Rosie Grier's "It's All Right To Cry" from Marlo Thomas' well-remembered but horrifically obsolete Free To Be You and Me (and Marshall Tucker Band's now-rhetorical "Can't You See") suggests a genuine sadness over ideals left castrated and bleeding beneath an avalanche of depressing truths about the state of our eroding union. The voice of its outrage is married to the nihilism of the modern age.

The story of a basehead befriending a girl (Shareeka Epps) headed for the wrong side of the law feels appropriately like doom--The Wizard of Oz reconfigured for the Wasteland. Maybe not surprisingly, what damages the film for me to some extent is its hopefulness: I don't even think it's cynical anymore to be unhopeful and I do wonder if I'm actually embarrassed that Half Nelson pulled my strings. What saves the film is the character of poor, conflicted, nuanced Dan as the new face of the American liberal. He's among the finest explanations we've had thus far of why the Left can't seem to muster a compelling resistance: in the face of all this outrage and insult, under the weight of almost four decades of poisoned passion, the voices of our best intentions find themselves tongue-tied and thunderstruck, sick on smack with their heads against a toilet--as slow in coming to our defense as the punchline that serves as this picture's surprisingly understated grace note. Half Nelson suggests that our stupor might be wearing off. I hope it's right.- (excerpted from a longer review found here)

Buy at Amazon USA
Buy at Amazon Canada

DVD VITALS:
Running Time
107 minutes
MPAA
R
Aspect Ratio(s)
1.78 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
English DD 5.1,
English Stereo
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English, Spanish
DVD-9
Region One
Sony

Buy the HALF NELSON poster at Moviegoods (click on image)

What's coming out on DVD? Check the release calendar

Published: February 5, 2007