Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
1/11/07
Storytelling serves many
different purposes: it cautions, amuses, thrills and inspires.
Any story can do these things, but there's a special thrill that comes
with depositing the word “true” in front of it: the feeling of possibility
that comes from knowing the one person really did overcome the odds, and
maybe they're not the only one who can. I think that's why most teacher
movies these days are at least “inspired” by real-life tales: sometimes
the news can really wear us down about our educational system and, by extension,
our society's future. It's good to be reminded that the right teacher
in the right place at the right time can still make magic happen, just
as Erin Gruwell did.
After the LA Riots, Erin
(Hilary Swank) decided to abandon her goal to become a lawyer and become
a teacher instead, to try and save people before they wound up in court.
She arrives at Wilson High in Long Beach with no experience but boundless
optimism. Cynical administrator Margaret Campbell (Imelda Staunton)
assigns her an English class of freshmen with the school's worst behavioral
and academic problems, and Erin's early classes are disastrous. The
students know nothing but the violence and racial division of their day-to-day
lives and believe they have no use for an education. Margaret won't
allow Erin to give them new books, fearful that they'll be destroyed and
confident that the students can't read them anyway. But while Erin's
sunny, optimistic worldview takes a beating, it refuses to budge even when
she has to take on second and third jobs to buy the books and finance field
trips herself. Slowly beginning to understand the dark lives of her
students, she gets their attention with the story of another doomed child
in a time of war, The Diary of Anne Frank, and assigns them to start
chronicling their own lives and thoughts in daily diaries. The class
and teacher form an inseparable bond, but it's challenged by the embittered
Ms. Campbell and Erin's increasingly disillusioned husband (Patrick Dempsey).
In many ways, Freedom
Writers is a predictable run though familiar territory: substitute
dance for writing and the plot outline is basically the same as last spring's
Take
the Lead among others I'm sure we could spend all day naming.
But two things make it stand out. One is the Freedom Writers'
Diary itself, used by writer/director Richard LaGravenese to great
effect as voice-over narration. Most movies about kids raised in
gangs have the cycles of violence covered, but few get so convincingly
inside their characters heads. The other is two really great performances.
Hilary Swank has as much range as any actress working today, but she often
comes up short on starpower. Here, she's able to reach down deep
and create an Erin Gruwell who's an almost supernatural force of goodness
and light, someone you can not only believe would never give up, but whom
others would ultimately rally behind. And it's just as easy to understand
why her less sunny colleagues would despise her (John Benjamin Hickey is
a delight as the “good” teacher who becomes Erin's rival), stacking the
odds against her. Generations of actors have flailed helplessly against
the role of the obstructive Principal/Administrator who refuses to let
the hero do the right thing (Alfre Woodard's practically wasted a whole
second career playing that role), but here Imelda Staunton makes it sing.
It's not just that she doesn't believe in the kids or Erin, it's that something
within her absolutely cannot allow their redemption to be true. The
way her initial condescension gives way to an all-consuming obsession (just
watch her shake with rage as she speaks late in the film) is really fascinating.
Alas, the same can't be said for Dempsey, who can't find anything to do
with Erin's McLoser of a husband that we haven't seen a hundred times before.
While there are no breakout performances among the kids (many of whom are
newcomers), they're all good enough to get the job done.
Erin's lesson plans are actually
pretty convincing, one cringe-inducing speech about how the Nazis were
“the Biggest Gang of them all” aside. Her activities designed to
get the students to see each other as people rather than ethnic stereotypes
and to believe in themselves ring true, and the movie really made me want
to read The Diary of Anne Frank (don't blame me, blame the high
school teachers who never assigned it to me for that shameful omission
from my reading list! OK, maybe you can blame me a little...).
A trip to the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance plays well
to the movie's themes, as do visits from real-life Holocaust survivors
who tell their stories. One of the most interesting aspects of the
story is the way a sort of Academic Stockholm Syndrome seemed to set in
between the teacher and her students, with both becoming so closely entwined
in each other's goals that the traditional teacher/student relationship
collapsed. It seems as though in the end, Gruwell's calling wasn't
so much to become A teacher as to become THE teacher of this
particular group.
It's hard to tell exactly
why Paramount has decided to dump this well-made and entertaining film
into the movie graveyard of the first week of 2007, but I urge anyone who
enjoys this sort of thing to seek it out. While Freedom Writers
may be a little familiar, it's the kind of story we need to hear as often
as we can. |
