A rookie teacher from the right side of the tracks takes on a classroom of urban toughs. Will her gentle intentions trump their rough upbringings?
Will one of them die in order to bring home the message that these kids really do face unimaginable odds?
Haven’t we been in this homeroom before?
It’s easy to be smart-alecky about “Freedom Writers,” the latest addition to cinema’s syllabus of classroom inspirationals. Schooled by the likes of “Blackboard Jungle,” “To Sir With Love” and “Stand and Deliver,” it’s easier still to anticipate each step the movie will take.
So it’s refreshing to find writer-director Richard LaGravenese’s “Freedom Writers” – starring Hilary Swank and a cast of compelling youngsters – is a solid, and dare we confess, inspiring surprise.
Based on the real-life journey of Erin Gruwell and students from Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif., “Freedom Writers” mixes optimism and hardship to moving effect.
Gruwell shows up for her first day with an easy smile, fresh complexion and Breck Girl hair. To her classroom of warehoused minority students (and one white kid), she smells like chum thrown to the sharks they believe themselves to be.
At first they thrash. They menace. They bite.
Against the advice of a senior teacher, Gruwell even wears a string of pearls to class. A laudable act of defiance, it’s also a gesture of cultural naivete.
Gruwell won’t take it on faith that her students are dangerous. And she won’t admit how her elegant accessory might set her apart from the lives of the self-segregated, uninterested kids.
In a trust exercise, Gruwell has her students face each other on a line. The scene looks like an outtake of Jets-andSharks animosity.
It’s West Coast Story where the knives are replaced by guns. And the constant crackling of ethnic tension in Room 203 mimics the turf battles the Asian, African-American and Latino kids fight in their neighborhoods.
When a kid passes around a drawing of a black student, Gruwell seizes on it. The analogy she makes between the doodle of Andre (musical performer Mario) and the caricatures of Jews in Hitler’s Germany is lost on them. They haven’t heard of the Holocaust.
Gruwell may be green, but she’s agile. If a lesson fails with the kids, she tries another way to get them to make connections with each other, with literature, with the world.
They read “The Diary of Anne Frank.” They begin keeping their own journals. They visit the Museum of Tolerance. They talk to Holocaust survivors. If it sounds hokey, why is it so exciting to see onscreen? Clearly aware that this genre invites the harrrumph of familiarity, LaGravenese upends such smugness time and again.
Like its teacher, “Freedom Writers” struts its trust in empathy and knowledge. The director found a game partner in Swank, who projects worry and compassionas well as refreshing dorkiness.
Like its bristling students, the film is willing to shove us a bit. Initially, the kids’ furious resistance – voiced best by gang- girl Eva (April Lee Hernandez) – exhausts.
The movie’s title comes from the name the students give themselves once they discover kinship with the 1960s civil rights Freedom Riders. LaGravenese takes the vulnerable, vibrant words found in their journals and infuses his movie with their subjectivity.
Gruwell’s husband, Scott (Patrick Dempsey of “Grey’s Anatomy”), starts off supportive. Gruwell’s father ( Scott Glenn) was once Erin’s own Atticus Finch; now the jaundiced progressive suggests his daughter pursue a corporate gig he deems worthy of her talents.
Forays into her Gruwell’s family life may be necessary. But none of those scenes top the goings-on in Room 203.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
“Freedom Writers” | *** RATING
PG-13 for violent content, some thematic material and language| 2 hours, 3 minutes|CLASSROOM INSPIRATIONAL|Written and directed by Richard LaGravenese; photography by Jim Denault; starring Hilary Swank, Patrick Dempsey, April Lee Hernandez, Scott Glenn, Mario, Jason Finn, Hunter Parrish |Opens today at area theaters.
This story has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, it incorrectly referred to the film “The Asphalt Jungle” as a classroom drama. The intended reference was the film “Blackboard Jungle.”
