Freedom Writers (***1/4)

? Written and directed by Richard LaGravenese (writer of The Bridges of Madison County, The Horse Whisperer, and Beloved) Freedom Writers dramatizes the story of real-life high school teacher Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank), whose first job is at a recently integrated school in Long Beach, California, where the student body isn’t so much diverse as Balkanized into racial identity groups.

+ I’ve seen other movies like this, but they don’t always seem genuine, and this does. One thing I liked about this was that you get a sense of the new teacher feeling her way in the job. She’s not an ex-marine like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, instantly in command. Even after she earns the respect of the students she seems a little nerdy when she tries to be hip. She gets by on sincerity, not attitude. In the most affecting moments, the students react to learning about the Holocaust, about which few had heard. This is another great role for Swank. Patrick Dempsey and Scott Glenn play her husband and father, respectively. The reactions of these strong supporting characters provide dimension to the main character.

- This is the latest in a genre that goes back to The Blackboard Jungle 50 years ago and includes more recent movies like Stand and Deliver and, most obviously, Dangerous Minds. Even movies like the dance-oriented Take the Lead incorporate the same formula of having a deeply caring, creative teacher inculcating middle-class values in a bunch of kids who seem like thugs to everyone else. There’s always a pigheaded person of authority who gets in the way and insists the kids are incorrigible. So does this movie tweak that formula? Not a lot. The reactionary authority figure is ably played by Imelda Staunton, but, true-to-life or not, she’s a cliché. Even though the movie is based largely on the writings of the students, the teacher is far and away the most significant character. The movie is largely from her view, the one with which most of the audience is likely to identify. The most developed of the student characters is a girl named Eva who’s been asked to lie in court about having seen another Mexican American commit a shooting, but you figure out quickly where that story’s going. To be fair, people go to see movies like this because teachers like Erin Gruwell seem like rarities as against many thousands of at-risk students who won’t be able to rely on getting teachers willing to chuck their social lives to show them another way.

= ***1/4 This movie has nothing new to say, but it says it well and will probably be a tearjerker for some of the audience and essentially a feel-good movie for most of it. The question it begs is, if teachers like this are so rare that they make movies about them, what hope is there for all the other kids growing up in violence-ridden neighborhoods?

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