Movie Reviews

You can’t blame the studios for releasing a seemingly endless stream of inspirational classroom stories. After all, almost every one of them is inspired by a true story: The tough teacher turns inner-city kids into li'l enlightened achievers, seasoned with a shooting or two and a couple buckets of tears. It takes a deft hand to make such a film fresh, as if we haven’t seen the same old story a million. Times. Before.

Writer-director Richard LaGravenese revitalizes the genre with Freedom Writers, based on teacher Erin Gruwell’s experiences at a turbulent high school in California right after the Rodney King riots. New to the classroom, Erin (Hilary Swank) is initially portrayed as such a complete naïf that you wonder if she’s ever even seen, like, Stand and Deliver. Clearly, no, and Swank’s cartoonish high-pitched Pollyanna cadence threatens to blow away the movie’s credibility.

But it’s her insistence on remaining such an idealist that ultimately sets the film apart. While Erin teaches her kids powerful lessons on unity and self-expression, she keeps that aw-shucks charm, a refreshingly vulnerable and original hero.

LaGravenese keeps the action moving and his shots are clear, unvarnished and unsentimental. He earns top marks during the pivotal scene where the wide-eyed “Miss G” finally cracks, and what follows is an intense debate on race with the students she struggles to understand. Instead of embellishing, LaGravenese lets the kids tell the story for him, and his camera simply follows the action. The thing about Freedom Writers is that it will follow you too, right out of the movie theatre and into your own head and heart.