An antidote to all the movies about heroic teachers in inner cities, this tells the story of a Brooklyn teacher (Ryan Gosling) who is himself in need of rescue. Shot in a subdued style suitable to the portrait of a junkie Gosling convincingly plays, it tells the story of the teacher and one of his eighth-grade history students, who’s also on the girls’ basketball team he coaches. The low-key approach is appealing. The classroom scenes, which show the teacher as engaged, well-liked, and liberal, lack the showiness of other teacher movies. For example, when the students read aloud they do it in the monotone typical of the way most thirteen-year-old kids would, not in a polished acting style. The filmmakers leave it to the viewer to decide what to think about a seemingly successful teacher with an illegal personal life. Even though I liked the minimalist cinematic approach, I wished the story had been edited and shaped into something that said a little more faster.
IMDB link
reviewed 8/13/07
viewed on DVD
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