Beyond the Multiplex

Gritty Social Realism week brings two of the year's best movies: The much celebrated "Half Nelson" and a passionate, Oscar-worthy German film.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

Dray (Shareeka Epps) and Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) in "Half Nelson"

Aug. 24, 2006 | It's Gritty Social Realism week here on the indie-film beat -- and, I know, it seems like it's that week almost every week. But with crimson leaves, apple cider and awards-show gossip right around the corner, even independent distributors are starting to trot out their big fall-season show horses. These days, those tend to be moody, serious-minded pictures with a sociological bent and a tragic sensibility. There may be some larger questions to raise about why indie filmmakers and audiences seem averse to fantasy and whimsy (even, lately, to comedy), but this week brings us two of the year's best films, both in GSR mode, so there's no point complaining.

I skipped a screening of "Half Nelson" when it opened in New York two weeks ago, despite glowing advance word on Ryan Gosling's performance. It was a busy week, and I'm intensely allergic to inspirational-teacher flicks. I suspected we were dealing with a new-generation remake of "To Sir With Love" or "Dead Poets Society" or (still worse) "Music of the Heart." Then Kevin Smith went on TV in place of the ailing Roger Ebert (we miss you, Rog! Feel better!) and said "Half Nelson" was the best film of the decade. Other critics were almost as enthusiastic, and I began to wonder whether I had miscalculated.

Boy, howdy. In this case, you should believe the hype. Gosling is indeed amazing as a bewildered, depressed New York schoolteacher who is slipping into dire drug addiction; it's exactly the kind of star turn in a smaller film that Academy voters could (and should) notice. (Next month brings us Maggie Gyllenhaal's similarly impressive turn as a semi-recovering addict in "Sherrybaby.") But "Half Nelson" is bigger than its star. It's a complex and defiant fable of American life run just slightly off the rails, delivering all the impact of "Crash" without the phony-baloney paradoxes or brick-in-the-face message delivery.

If there was any justice in the movie world, Turkish-born Yilmaz Arslan's extraordinary drama "Fratricide," following a grisly blood feud between Kurdish and Turkish immigrants in Germany, would also be an Oscar contender. Somehow I doubt that German film authorities will nominate a picture that depicts their nation as a soulless bureaucratic state that reduces new immigrants to brutality. Be that as it may, "Fratricide" marks Arslan as one of Europe's hottest young talents, drawing simultaneously on the film traditions of America, Western Europe and the Middle East.

If "Princesas," a drama about the unlikely friendship between a pair of Madrid prostitutes, from the Spanish director Fernando León de Aranoa, is half a notch below those two movies, it'd still be my top pick most other weeks of the year. Yes, these are whores with hearts of gold, but I got past the cornball factor pretty fast. Candela Peña (of Pedro Almodóvar's "All About My Mother") is sensational in the leading role, and the film is big-hearted, poetic, sweet, sad and romantic.

That leaves only "The Quiet," an implausible and sadistic little family-secrets film from director Jamie Babbit (she made the lesbian-themed teen comedy "But I'm a Cheerleader"). This definitely doesn't belong to the GSR genre, despite a few nods at depicting high-school society; it's more like LGT (Lurid Gothic Trash). Babbit is skilled at creating atmosphere and mood, all of it creepy or sodden, and actresses Elisha Cuthbert and Camilla Belle put their hearts into their roles, which are, unfortunately, encased in a sleazoid TV movie of the week tarted up in art-school clothes.

Next page: Turning the tired schoolteacher genre inside out