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The movie is very smartly designed so that Gosling’s character, Dan, can patronize the black community around him while embracing it while fearing it while supporting it. The movie does the same thing. Dan is not alone in having a heart of gold. Everyone in the movie has a heart of gold. And this makes for some wonderful, seductive performances. (I would not object in any way to the young Shareeka Epps getting a Supporting Actress nomination, though I don’t foresee this film making a dent at The Academy.) But it is bullshit.

Watching a movie in which the crack dealer (another great performance by Anthony Mackie) maintains an even demeanor… even an honorable position… is a cool movie turn. And when he turns out young Drey (Ms Epps’ character) to deliver on her way to being a part of the dealing team, we worry for her, but the movie doesn’t ask us to hate him. He is doing the best he can in a bad, bad world.

Drey’s brother is in prison… but he gets a pass because he didn’t rat out his friends. Drey’s mom is working hard, so her lack of awareness and willingness to shake her finger about Drey seeing Frank (Mackie’s crack dealer) while also stashing his money in her purse is okay. Even Dan’s clumsily attempted rape late in the movie is excused by the film because he is lost and the woman was once a happy sexual partner of his.

In Half Nelson, it doesn’t matter why things are the way they are… they just are. And We (the collective we) are all victims of that reality. And we don’t have to answer for our sins because someone else is responsible for them… all of them.

I am not suggesting that a sympathetic portrait of addicts and inner city dwellers and crack dealers, etc, isn’t possible or dramatically valid. But what Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden have done here is to make a movie that turns, for instance, the Coppola/Scorsese view of the criminal world upside down.

In their mafia films, there is a warm center that reminds us that people in the mafia are still human beings, whether they are going through Shakespearian events or intimate ones. But we always come back to these powerful men being dealt blows that can be traced back to their own actions. And they all know that in the end, they are stone cold murderers.

The one character who gets near Half Nelson treatment is Don Vito Corleone (Brando), since we only see the early years and the end of his life. In the first film, Don Vito is the wise, old figure who has power and is staying out of wars in a well-defined universe. He is a charismatic and little he says ever seems to conflict with the audience’s idea of righteousness. But he is also the obvious leader of a criminal organization. This is his crack.

It isn’t until The Godfather II that we get into Don Vito’s roots. And even in the first film, there is no movie unless we get into what the father has brought into the life of his sons, his daughter, and the extended family. But Vito gets away surprisingly clean. (Dying helps with that.)

The difference between Don Vito and Half Nelson’s Dan is that Don Vito would never delude himself into thinking he was something other than what he was. Even Don Vito knows that he is in a world of his own creation.

There is a very telling piece of dialogue in Boden/Fleck’s script for Half Nelson. Dan is teaching his class, via a clip of Mario Savio’s famous speech on what became “The Savio Steps” at UC Berkeley, about how you have to put your body into the gears of “The Machine,” to make it stop:

Class Girl: Aren’t you the machine?

Dan: Oh yeah, I guess you got me. Alright, so I’m part of the machine. But if I’m part of it, so are you. We all are.

In this small piece of dialogue, the filmmakers give up the game completely. And as an audience member, either you go there or you don’t.

Yes, in the broadest of terms, we are all part of The Machine.

But to quote “Dan” again, as he starts the discussion of what The Machine is: “Let’s say it’s a metaphor… he’s saying this machine is keeping me down… what is that… what’s keeping us from being free?”

Well, we can get into a long discussion about what “free” is, but let’s not.

In my worldview, my freedom is not the same freedom as a kid in a ghetto. The freedom that came from the opportunity inherent to my particular life changes the game too significantly for our situations to be equivalent. That is not to say that I can’t fall from my perch even faster than a person with nothing can rise to one higher than I came from. I believe in personal responsibility… and in the reality that the world is filled with varieties.

I do not believe that The Machine is keeping every single person frozen in place. Not at all. But there is a Machine and it is filled with dark corners that breed hopelessness and a sense of helplessness that make rising much, much harder.

Half Nelson is – as so many “Sundance films” are – a very skilled effort at having the cake and eating it too. It is loaded to the gills with the beauty of rebellion. I don’t think it is a coincidence that, even beyond the speech itself, that Mario Savio was the speaker since he was one of the few members of the 60s movements who never sold out, never sought fame, and didn’t appear to get twisted by middle age and the Reagan-era 80s.

Half Nelson is a movie that wants to believe that our heroes were/are oppressed and in response to that oppression, flawed in ways that can easily be forgiven.

In my eyes, a white man with a good brain a handsome face and a strong physique from a middle class family – even one who has drunks as parents – must have some very dark demons to be becoming a crackhead. Either that or he is weak on a very profound level. And I don’t really believe that he is a high-functioning crackhead, who wants to save the world, but is held back by The Machine. For all of the great acting and lovely stylization by Fleck as director, it is every bit as trite and obvious as To Sir With Love or any other classic feel bad/feel good movie. (And I love To Sir With Love, in part because it knows what it is and doesn't apologize.)

It’s been almost seven months since I first saw this film at Sundance and wrestled with my ambivalence. There is so much to like here. But I felt something rotten at the core. And when I revisited the film, I was hoping that I had just been in a mood or too surrounded by films that were proud of themselves for being edgy back then. But alas, no.

I am more appreciative of the style and the skill of Half Nelson than I was before. But that rotten core, which is most powerfully established in the first act, still kills the movie for me. It is similar to what I disliked about crash… it wasn’t the gimmick of coincidence, it was the glibness of every character having both a good and bad moment.

I have nothing against the idea that people who do bad things are not always bad people. That makes for great drama. But the drama of beautiful, pouty hero/victim? Save me!

It is the pretend political consciousness of this film that makes it painful to me. At least Savio fought the fight for a while and didn’t crumble into a whinny ball. (Savio also went across country, from NY to Berkeley, for college.) If someone tells me to “fight the power” only to show themselves to be unwilling to show any of the qualities – however many of them his/her DNA and circumstance foisted on them – needed to do that, I say, “See you when you get your shit together, pretender.” When a smart young black girl who has seen and synthesized the harsh reality of the world she has been born into teams up with a weak white man and somehow, it is suggested to us that he is party to her salvation, I get a little pissed.

Really, this whole thing feels like the start of a long, long, long discussion over many bottles of wine and a nearly DVD of the film for reference. But there is something about it that just keeps hitting me as racial patronizing and incredibly youthfully hopeful and, as clear minded as the film seems at times, incredibly caught in its own web.

Watch for Half Nelson to compete with Little Miss Sunshine to be the dominant force at the Indie Spirit Awards in February.