Babble

Genres exist to be destroyed, or at least reinvigorated, and last year's Half Nelson did both for the "inspiring and unconventional inner-city teacher" drama. Along with exceptional performances and a semi-documentary realism, the film worked because it incorporated the teacher's curriculum into the filmmaking, just as the teacher worked his personal shortcomings into his teaching. Freedom Writers is another beast entirely: a pedestrian, cut-and-paste MTV Films release dumped onto screens in the first week of January. But Richard LaGravenese's film somehow transcends its considerable limitations through the force of its ideas.

Hilary Swank assumes the Michelle Pfeiffer mantle as a well-meaning college grad who, in the wake of the L.A. riots, opts to teach a class of at-risk students at Long Beach's Roosevelt High School as an exercise in social action. Armed with a Starbucks latte and a chichi pearl necklace, she fruitlessly attempts to charm a freshman class separated by gang colors and racial disparity. But after a visit to the Museum of Tolerance and a reading of Anne Frank's diary, the students begin to put their own histories on paper and warm up to the idea of an education.

Freedom Writers is overlong and schematic, and the students' transition from gangbangers to peacemakers lacks fluidity, but the film offers an inspiring view of history as teaching tool. It's like a calculated riposte to the teacher in The History Boys who's so overwhelmed by the Holocaust that he would rather keep it out of the lesson plan. Freedom Writers doesn't deny that equating World War II with inner-city gang violence is a risible gesture, but it convinces that an inability to learn from history is the most damaging form of Holocaust denial. -- Akiva Gottlieb