As some of you know, I'm a huge Ryan Gosling fan and I was really looking forward to seeing Half Nelson. Unfortunately I was disappointed. It was okay, but honestly, if anyone other than "my man" Ryan was in it, I probably would've thought it was garbage.

Dan Dunne (Gosling) is an eighth grade history teacher to a group of mainly black and Hispanic kids. He has unorthodox teaching methods and is very passionate about the history of the American civil rights movment.
Dan is also running a serious crack habit and when one of his students, Drey, discovers him strung out in one of the school toilet cubicles, she hides his secret and thus begins a friendship with him.

Drey’s life is fairly hard too. She lives with her single mother, who is always working and has older brother in jail because of his involvement with a neighbourhood drug dealer.

My problem with this film began when I realized nothing was really happening. There were a series of dramatic set ups, but one after another came and went without serious consequence.

SPOILERS AHEAD

For example, Dan was driving Drey around quite a bit and taking her home after school, surely such a crossing of boundaries between a teacher and a student would create some problems? No.

In another scene Dan's boss calls him into her office to discuss her concerns about his behaviour, but she doesn’t actually say what those concerns are and the scene ends.

In yet another squandered opportunity for some action, Dan goes to confront the drug dealer that Drey’s brother was involved with, to tell him to stay away from Drey and yep, you guessed it, nothing happens.

Later, when he’s totally wasted, Dan goes over to a female co-workers house, who he had been dating and tries to force him self on her. She repels his advances and locks herself in her bedroom and that's the end of that.
Surely they should have put in a scene where he sees her at work the next day and has some kind of closure or further conflict over what happened.

As for the climax, there wasn’t one. This was probably apt for a film where nothing much happened.

However, I did learn something from seeing Half Nelson. If you want people to think your film is art house use grainy film stock.

I mostly agree with your review of Half Nelson Chris.  The only this is that I actually liked the movie.  This was mainly because I only see it as a very well acted movie (mostly because of Ryan Gosling).

You're completely right though, nothing really happens in this movie and it is terribly paced.  The long scenes are unnecessary and nothing happens in them and the short scenes could have been greatly expanded.

Besides the grainy film stock element, whenever I took notice, the camera was always shaking which leads me to think the lack of tripod also makes it "art house".

Really, the only reason to see this film is the notable performance by Gosling.

-Pat

I was quite shocked when I saw that Gosling was nominated for an academy award for this.  I mean it was well deserved on his part because he did an outstanding job in it and carried the film on his back.  Like was previously stated, this would have been complete and utter garbage had this been acted by a lesser man.