Dir.
Richard LaGravenese, Germany/US, 2007, 123 mins
Cast: Hilary
Swank, Patrick Dempsey, April Lee Hernandez
Review by Carol Allen
This is the one about
the idealistic young schoolteacher taking on a class of delinquent
teenagers – see
From Sir With Love (Sidney Poitier as the determined teacher)
to Dangerous Minds (Michelle Pfeiffer). The genre dictates
that after a difficult time, the plucky teacher will win
the battle and the pupils will adore him/her. And so it is
in Freedom Writers, based we are told on the true story of
Erin Gruwell (Swank), who at the age of 23 went into Wilson
High School, Long Beach, bright-eyed, full of idealism, wearing
a cherry red suit and the string of pearls her daddy had
given her. This was two years after the Rodney King race
riots of 1992. As her freshman English class is a somewhat
scary ethnic mix of African Americans, Latinos and Asians,
gang members, delinquents and other underprivileged students
with one understandably nervous white guy, who seems to have
wandered in from another planet, our hopes for the brightly
smiling Erin are not at this stage high.
To be fair, we are already emotionally engaged by at least
one of the students, Eva (Hernandez), a girl loaded with
attitude, whose history of being a nine year old seeing her
brother shot by a rival gang, her father unjustly imprisoned
and her early teen initiation into her home gang we have
already seen in flashback with the implied assumption that
all the other students have similar difficult backgrounds.
The assumption is borne out, when, after some over optimistic
attempts at introducing her class to the glories of English
literature, Erin hits on the idea of getting them to write
diaries of their own lives, sparked off by a racist cartoon
one of the students draws of another, which leads her to
tell them the story of Anne Frank. Her task is not helped
by the attitude of the headmistress (Imelda Staunton), who
hates the integration policy that has been forced on her
formerly white and high-achieving school and refuses to allow
these particular students books, on the grounds that they
will only destroy them. So in order to buy the materials
she needs, Erin supplements her small teacher's salary with
a couple of extra jobs, to the detriment of her marriage
to Scott (Dempsey). And you've guessed it, by the end of
the film, Erin has won the hearts of her students to the
extent that they persuade the school board to buck the system
and let her be their teacher for the rest of their high school
careers - an unlikely notion but as it's a true story, presumably
it happened.
This is not a bad film. It's well acted particularly by
Swank, Hernandez and Dempsey. But it is simplistic, manipulative
and over idealistic. Some may find it racially offensive
in its depiction of the students, who all incidentally look
a bit old for first year high school pupils, as universally
delinquent. It's also arguably racist in using an English
actress to represent the reactionary educational attitude.
Implicitly it raises some interesting questions regarding
the social engineering of the education system. Erin it appears
succeeded with this one class and presumably a few others
(150 students in all according to her website) taking them
through to graduation. She then left the school environment
to found an educational project that promotes inclusion and
provides scholarships for children in need. But successful
social integration requires an army of exceptionally dedicated
and determined Erins, prepared to spend a lifetime in the
classroom. Realistically how many of them are there out there
prepared to devote their lives to the cause? |
