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Life Lessons

Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson
  • Posted at 1:20pm
  • 28 August 2008
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

For me it was Mr Gilbert and Mrs Elderkin, who taught English at Weston Favell Upper School and who, between them, helped demystify the works of Hardy, Shakespeare and Dickens. But I mean no disrespect to either when I say that the Hollywood studios would hastily reject their tutelage of the future Radio Times film editor as a Hollywood pitch.

To cut it as a mentor figure in the movies you have to be uncompromising, or reclusive, or wild, or enigmatic, or - in the very specific case of Ryan Gosling's eighth-grade teacher in the excellent Half Nelson - hooked on crack.

Gosling's Mr Dunne, who brings a new meaning to the phrase "supply teacher", is a long way from Robin Williams's English teacher, Mr Keating, in Dead Poets Society, who gets the boys at a stuffy academy to stand on their desks and "seize the day". He's further still from cinema's most iconic and inspirational educator Charles Chipping, played by Robert Donat in 1939's Goodbye, Mr Chips. On his deathbed, the childless "Mr Chips" insists he really did have kids, "Thousands of them. And all boys!"

But Mr Dunne is no less important to his students than his noble cinematic forebears. Despite being the worse for wear after an evening's extracurricular activities, he manages to cast an unorthodox spell over his history class at a Brooklyn school, with rambling theories such as, "Change moves in spirals, not circles."

In Finding Forrester, basketball prodigy and budding writer Rob Brown gets tuition from Sean Connery's reclusive Pulitzer Prize-winning author. As with all modern mentor movies it's not just the student who has "issues", and it's never just about academic achievement. As the gooey tagline to the 1994 version of The Browning Version declares: "The greatest lessons in life are the ones learned by the heart."

Gus Van Sant, who directed Finding Forrester, also made Good Will Hunting, in which Matt Damon's troubled maths genius is encouraged to fulfil his potential by shrink Robin Williams. Now there's a man who really has changed the lives of "thousands" in his film career.

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