January 5, 2007 -- ONE teacher can make a difference in a troubled student's life. I learned this from "To Sir, with Love," "Dangerous Minds" and Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" video.
In "Freedom Writers," a zippy idealist (Hilary Swank) with a Colgate smile as bright as her pearls teaches remedial English to young Long Beach, Calif., gangstas. They are so taken with her radical methods (self-esteem vitamins for all) that they holster their automatic weapons and pick up "The Diary of Anne Frank."
Swank's character, Erin Gruwell, is a real educator who, in the years following the Rodney King riots, coaxed her students into writing about their bullet-riddled lives. Their racism - when the students arrived in her classroom, they immediately segregated themselves into snarling ethnic enclaves - became a springboard to talk about Anne Frank and the Nazis (whom Swank calls "the most famous gang in his tory," causing several students to express interest in joining up).
Writer-director Richard LaGravenese ("The Fisher King") is one of Hollywood's top screenwriters, and though his Erin is, like most movie teachers, a chalk-dusted saint, he whips up dialogue that is both canny and credible. Excerpts from actual students' diaries provide the grit ("I hate the feeling of a cold gun up against my skin. Makes me shiver") to set off the comedy: "I apologize. My badness!" says Erin.
Her husband (Patrick Dempsey) is more complicated than your average movie spouse. "I worry all night because you're a teacher at Attica," he says. He isn't wholly likable - in this role he's more McDroopy than McDreamy - but he does have a valid viewpoint. When Erin announces with her customary manic pep that she is taking on part-time work so she can buy more school supplies, he says, "You're gonna get an extra job to pay for your job?"
LaGravenese is a dialogue and character man, though, not a master of structure; his films often trickle to a conclusion, which is exactly what happens here. And though I admire him for using a big chunk of time to show actual teaching (instead of cheating with a montage) about an actual topic - the Holocaust - many young viewers are going to zone out at the eat-your-veggieness of it all. One hundred and twenty-two minutes without Spider-Man or Jack Sparrow is a long sit when you're 14.
The message is also a bit muddy. Are the students shackled by something internal to their community, or external? Crime, or the police? Motivation, or the class system? Though they live in a murderous part of Long Beach, the teens are forever being framed for things they didn't do. That makes them nice movie characters but also more like movie characters than actual boiling youth.
Some of the movie's contradictions are minor (it's rated PG-13 so kids will be able to see it, but if it actually recorded the way kids talk, it would be rated R), and some aren't. It is so transparently for, by and about well-meaning white liberals that the real story - desperate minorities living on the edge of a knife - at times becomes mere setting.
The real Erin Gruwell quit shepherding public high school students after five years and became first a college teacher and then a traveling speaker. I don't blame her - but if her calling were teaching at-risk teens, instead of talking about teaching at-risk teens, she would still be doing it.
'Freedom Writers'
As a tenacious teacher, Hilary Swank transforms "Freedom Writers."
By Kevin Crust, Times Staff Writer
As a tenacious teacher, Hilary Swank transforms 'Freedom Writers.' Among the lessons to be learned from the inspiring, feel-good drama "Freedom Writers" is never to underestimate the persuasive powers of Hilary Swank. Even in writer-director Richard LaGravenese's formulaic adaptation of "The Freedom Writers Diary," a compilation of journal entries written by Long Beach high school students, Swank shows that in the right role her unusually disarming talent can elevate routine material.
As real-life teacher Erin Gruwell, Swank enters with coltish enthusiasm, dangerous naivete and a toothsome smile that suggests maybe she isn't up to the task of turning a classroom full of hardened teens, embittered by their hateful environment, into scholars.
Amid the schematic setup of Gruwell attempting to win the trust of the students while overcoming the red tape of the system, something fairly amazing happens. Just as Gruwell the teacher starts to regain her balance after a rocky beginning, Swank the actor likewise kicks into gear, shrugging off the impediments of the stereotypical scenario and turning what might have been a routine, entirely forgettable January release into a surprisingly moving experience.
In scene after scene, it's a marvel to watch Swank determinedly making her case, shrewdly winning over the audience as Gruwell persuades her charges to give her a chance to turn them on to literature, history and the opportunity to share their own narratives. There is a raw, guileless quality to Swank that shreds any hint of condescension or exploitation.
Intoxicated with the possibility of the students succeeding, the character's growing confidence becomes tangible, playing over Swank's face like a kid learning to ride a bike. Initially charming but skittish, Gruwell emerges as a fighter, every bit as resolute as Swank's Maggie Fitzgerald in "Million Dollar Baby."
The film itself, set in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, suffers from the over-familiarity one feels toward the whole dedicated-teacher-inspires-students-against-all-odds genre, compounded by fatigue for the telling of minority stories through a white protagonist. Almost evenly divided among Latinos, Cambodians and African Americans (plus one scared-to-death white kid), the class seethes with the racial tension that spills in from the streets outside. The school, epitomized by an obstinate department head (Imelda Staunton) and an imperious honors instructor (John Benjamin Hickey), refuses to "waste" actual books on them, an attitude Gruwell can't abide.
The everyday violence experienced by the students is established as both the stimulus that divides them and the eventual basis for their bonding. Their distrust of the new teacher will be recognizable to anyone who has seen "Dangerous Minds" and any number of other movies and telefilms featuring a crusading teacher and at-risk students.
The individual students emerge more as types than clichés and are mainly distinguishable by the strength of the actors (spotlighted are April Lee Hernandez, Jason Finn and Mario). Some of the actors seem a little old to be playing high schoolers, but that is almost a given for the genre and is likely in part to make the 32-year-old Swank more credible as the fresh-out-of-college Gruwell.
In supporting roles, Patrick Dempsey adds bittersweet wit as Gruwell's neglected husband, and Scott Glenn plays her skeptical father. .
Dramatically, the movie never veers from its predictable course, but Swank's performance renders the point moot. There likely was a better, more original movie to be made focusing more on the Freedom Writers themselves, but if this more conventional direction had to be taken, it's hard to imagine a more affecting version.
'Writers' passes test of youth in conflict
Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News
Friday, January 5, 2007
A capsule description of Freedom Writers might not do much to sell you on the movie, but here goes: An enthusiastic teacher finds ways to reach recalcitrant students in a California high school.
No question: This one seems to have so much "been-there-done- that" potential that you walk in expecting the cliches to prove as irritating as fingernails on a chalkboard.
But Freedom Writers gradually finds its place in the cinematic classroom, telling a moving story and boasting a fine performance from Hilary Swank, as a teacher who's simply incapable of being daunted. And, no, the story isn't a total rehash of every other similar movie.
In 1994, Swank's Erin Gruwell arrives at Long Beach's Wilson High School with high ideals. She quickly learns that her classroom isn't quite the laboratory for diversity she expected; rather, it's a field of conflict. The black, Latino and Asian students don't get along, and almost all the youngsters are more committed to cultivating attitude than learning anything.
"Don't try to understand us," one of them warns the prim-looking Gruwell, the presumption being that a white teacher has no clue what it's like to grow up in neighborhoods where it's almost impossible to reach 16 without having lost a friend to gang violence.
Based on a true story, Freedom Writers eventually gets around to writing. Gruwell encourages her students to keep diaries. They can leave them for her to read or not, but she wants them to stay with it. (Published in 1999, The Freedom Writers Diary contains many of the kids' essays.)
After an ugly racial incident in her classroom, Gruwell interests her students in the Holocaust. She uses The Diary of Anne Frank as an entry point, and the students slowly expand their views of the world.
Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King and The Bridges of Madison County) directs in a straightforward manner, laying out Gruwell's many challenges. Her husband (Patrick Dempsey) ultimately wearies of his wife's nonstop commitment. Her father (Scott Glenn) once worked in the civil rights movement, but doubts that Gruwell's students can be reached. And Gruwell's enthusiasm isn't exactly contagious: Imelda Staunton plays a teacher who thinks Gruwell should stick to more traditional methods.
Of the students, at least one stands out. April Lee Hernandez portrays Eva, a youngster who has built a protective wall around herself. She becomes involved in a part of the story that brings important issues of trust and loyalty into focus.
The movie makes it biggest emotional impact in a scene in which the woman who hid the Frank family visits the students. By this time, Gruwell's charges have come to see the Nazis as a kind of gang gone wild. They're deeply moved by testimony from Miep Gies (Pat Carroll), and so are we.
It's difficult not to be touched by the story of young people who work this hard. Whether Gruwell's approach has wider applications is a matter for educators to debate. For now, it's enough that Freedom Writers - taking its cue from Gruwell - respects the viewpoints of youngsters whose lives too often carried them into battle zones.
Leave it to Hilary Swank. Even when her film's pace lags behind its cliches, she sparks this true story, about a California teacher who sparks her students, with the passion the subject demands. Erin Gruwell (Swank), wearing pearls, yet, seems helplessly ill-equipped on her first day at Wilson High School in Long Beach. The time is just after the Rodney King riots. Racial tension is high. But Erin, inexperienced and hopelessly naive, thinks she really can teach English to a class of blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians, most of whom are involved with gangs. The school authorities, repped by a ramrod Imelda Staunton, merely expect Erin to warehouse these alleged no-hopers, played with feeling by a cast of newcomers, who move their desks to segregate themselves into racial groups. Erin must learn their ghetto reality before she can reach them, which she does by assigning The Diary of Anne Frank and getting them to write letters to Miep Gies (Pat Carroll), the woman who helped the Frank family hide from the Nazis. Miep's visit to Erin's classroom is the film's emotional highlight. But Erin's most notable accomplishment was to persuade her students to write their own stories of persecution. These journals were published in 1999 as The Freedom Writers Diary, which writer-director Richard LaGravenese (Living Out Loud) used as his source material. Erin's dedication helped end her marriage -- Patrick Dempsey, a.k.a. Grey's Anatomy's Dr. McDreamy, plays the whiny husband -- but started young lives on a whole new course. Corny? You bet. And worse when the plot veers into the glitz of a Dangerous Minds and the sappiness of a TV After School Special. But the movie, which Swank helped produce by using her clout as a two-time Oscar winner, gets to you.
Because a dangerous mind is a terrible plot premise to waste, there will always be movies about dedicated teachers who, by dint of the stardom applied to the role, inspire combustible, at-risk kids to open their minds. Freedom Writers is one of those movies — square, sincere, and proud of it. Based on a book that teacher Erin Gruwell assembled out of her students' diary entries, this version dramatizes the real-life story of the idealistic young white Gruwell (Hilary Swank) at a Long Beach, Calif., high school, in the angry mid-1990s era following the Rodney King riots, whose underserved lot of black, Latino, and Asian students have been marked to fail. (Vera Drake's estimable Imelda Staunton stumbles over the thankless task of representing the kind of cartoonishly cynical educator who gives up — a crummy first Hollywood gig, unstable American accent and all.)
Swank is so earnest, with her big white smile and pleading neck tendons, that it's hard not to embrace the decency and passion of the movie, adapted and directed by Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King). And when the emphasis is off Gruwell and on the kids' own words and lives, so much the better for the drama's narrative energy. The recent shooting death of Armand Jones, one of the charismatic non-pro actors cast as a student, draws awful attention to the reality that anchors this Hollywood extra-credit project.
By JACK MATHEWS
Monday, March 5th 2007, 4:00 AMTop of Form