3. Ryan Gosling in Half-Nelson
Ryan Gosling has emerged as one the preeminent contemporary movie stars over the last few years. After receiving rave reviews in the surprise hit of the 2011 Cannes film festival, Drive, Gosling followed that up by starring alongside Steve Carell in the big summer romantic comedy release, Crazy, Stupid, Love, and towards the end of the year, Gosling starred in, The Ides of March, the George Clooney-directed political thriller that received a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination. This year, he gave a stunning performance (my favorite of the year thus far) as a low-life bank robber trying to provide a future for his new born son in the underrated The Place Beyond the Pines and will be seen (but apparently not heard too much) in about a months time in his second collaboration with Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn in Refns latest directorial effort, Only God Forgives, which premiered a Cannes a few weeks ago to decisively mixed reviews. Interestingly, Gosling has built his movie stardom through the unusual route of becoming an art-house hero, because with the exception of The Notebook, Gosling has built his cult mostly through solid performances in independent films. One of the first of these was in Ryan Flecks Half-Nelson. While I have come to join the Gosling fan club due to his recent performances, I have to admit to disliking Half-Nelson with a passion and not being all that enamored with his performance in the film. Half-Nelson tells the story of an insufferably sanctimonious drug-taking junior high-school teacher who works in a poor urban neighborhood and quickly becomes a close friend and mentor to one of his students. The movie is everything I hate about "realist" cinema. Insincere, pious, and pretentious, the movie, however much it pretends to deny this, thinks it knows the world better than the world knows itself. The film uses Gosling's "too cool for school" schoolteacher (I know, how ironic, right?) as its chief proselytizer of this message, and in the process creates a character so ostentatiously didactic, that he makes your average college professor seem devil-may-care. As many issues as I have with Gosling's character though, the film's problems derive more from the direction than the acting. It is the film that canonizes this hip schoolteacher, not Gosling, and the fact of the matter is there are people in the world like the films protagonist and Gosling does an apt job of recreating the character. I may dislike the movie and its main character, but judging the performance objectively, Gosling does a sufficient job, showcasing the potential he delivered on in subsequent years and performances.