“I think for all of us it was important to make a real and honest film,” says Maria Reyes over breakfast at a local restaurant one recent morning.
“We took the responsibility seriously to make sure the emotion, the desperation, the anger and the angst of just being a teenager – and, most important, that concept of change – jumped out at you and grabbed you.”
Reyes is one of the original students depicted in Richard LaGravenese’s “Freedom Writers,” about rookie teacher Erin Gruwell and her students from Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif. In fact, the character based on Reyes, Eva, is the steeliest of the supposed hard cases.
“Freedom Writers,” starring Hilary Swank, opens next Friday. And it is one of the latest in a gentle swell of studio movies that include Edward Zwick’s “Blood Diamond,” and the Will Smith charmer “The Pursuit of Happyness” that suggests that
Hollywood believes audiences are ready to be challenged even as they are entertained.
These movies come bearing messages. However, each chooses different ways to impart its lessons about poverty and education, homelessness and determination, conflict diamonds, civil war and boy soldiers.
Consider them neo-message movies, though that might be expressing a hope for this blip to become a trend.
Hollywood movies bent on saying something about contemporary social issues once were tagged “message” movies. It wasn’t necessarily a compliment, or even a neutral description. And Stanley Kramer, the reluctant but undeniable king of them, was cool to the title.
Yet in short order, the director made a slew of memorable films that used the dramatic to grapple with the often traumatic: racism in “The Defiant Ones” (1958); A-bomb anxieties in “On the Beach” (1959); the clash of science and ideology in “Inherit the Wind” (1960); war crimes in “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961). With 1967’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” he delivered a compassionate chiding of liberal hypocrisy.
Not a stranger to the reawakening message movie, Steven Spielberg once described Kramer as “one of our great filmmakers, not just for the art and passion he put on screen, but for the impact he has made on the conscience of the world.”
What sort of impact “Blood Diamond” could have on the conscience of the world – or more tellingly the U.S. – has diamond purveyors rightly anxious. It’s hard to exit the theater and not, at the very least, have a conversation about one’s relationship to the natural resources of another country, or continent.
Message movies can be talky. And Zwick’s gripping film delivers some of its sharp lessons about economic exploitation and civil unrest in conversation. A bartender tells smuggler Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) that unlike whites in Sierra Leone (and Africa in general) “we were here long before you and will be long after you.” Later, on a red-dirt road near Capetown, South Africa, Archer and a former “Rhodesian” colonel engage in a conversation that doesn’t merely push the plot but provides insight into the mindset of Southern African whites about their African identities.
Yet, one of the most ironic lines isn’t about bling but about the black gold Jed Clampett sang of. “I hope they don’t find oil here,” a codger sitting in a decimated village tells fisherman Solomon Vandy. “Then we’d really have problems.”
In a very different way, Italian director Gabriele Muccino makes sure that the uplifting story of Chris Gardner (Will Smith) never trumps the fact of homelessness. He does this not in dialog but with a persistent, insistent gaze that captures the faces of homelessness.
The notion that entertainment can rattle audiences enough to do something more than squirm in their seats isn’t new. But feature films, especially in an era of genre retreads and the rise of documentaries, haven’t been doing this sort of heavy lifting.
Important to Gruwell and company is that “Freedom Writers” have a vigorous life beyond the theater.
“We feel this obligation to take it to a level people aren’t used to going,” says Gruwell. “We wanted to create a dialogue where we could talk about these issues that are still happening. Why can’t every kid have that hopeful experience? Why can’t every kid have someone who cares about them?”
What distinguishes “Freedom Writers” from other classroom inspirationals is that the students have a powerful voice in the story of their own transformation. Much of the film’s authenticity comes from the journals Gruwell had her students keep as a way of connecting them to a world beyond their self-segregated, gang- patrolled borders.
At the restaurant, Freedom Writer Manuel Scott recounts a moment from the previous night’s screening.
After the one-time resident of Aurora shared some of his struggles, a young Latino boy came up to him. “He started to cry,” says Scott, then told him, “I know what it’s like to have a mother on cocaine.”
“After that, he just lost it,” says Scott, looking the part of a mentor in a light gray suit and rich cherry tie. “I think that’s part of the power and the beauty of the story. We’re real people who made a difference, who were able to be transformed and transform others in the process. It resonates with people of every race, every class.
“So this young man, we offered him a glimmer of hope. Knowing where I came from and seeing what I’m doing now, he saw a glimpse of his own possibility.”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-954-1567 or at lkennedy@denverpost.com.
