Freedom Writers Just Passes

With her high cheekbones and slender physique, Hilary Swank is a woman of boundless strength and confidence who assumes command in almost every scene in which she appears. In the predictably earnest Freedom Writers, she portrays Erin Gruell, a naive high school English teacher relegated to teaching a racially mixed but homogenously raucous group of freshmen and sophomores in Long Beach, California. She has the class no one wants. (She has one fearful white student in her class, and he's the subject of obvious jokes.) Freedom Writers is another big studio project from the Stand and Deliver and Dangerous Minds school of films based on real-life accounts of noble men and women who engage in nontraditional teaching methods to turn around the lives of hopelessly depressed students in two hours.

Swank, a two-time Oscar-winning actress, turns in yet another fine performance. Her work here nearly saves this often overwrought and overlong film from the trappings of Hollywood conventions. In the film's two-hour-plus running time, she's given a wide range of emotions to portray, and Ms. Swank proves she's up to the task. Her Erin grapples with her father's disappointment over her decision to pursue teaching instead of law, her husband's growing discontent, a less than supportive vice principal, and students who let her know from the outset that they have no reason to listen to lectures from a young white teacher from Newport Beach--the other side of the tracks. Still Swanks exudes enough passion in her performance to convince us that her Erin has the persistence to inspire her previously poor-performing students to want to learn about the Holocaust and to use what they learn to write and successfully publish their own diaries.

Written and directed by Richard LaGravenese, Freedom Writers is at times awkward and derivative. The opening scenes of the film feature footage from the LA riots after the Rodney King trial in the 1990s interspersed with scenes involving several characters in the film. A few of the characters are given voice-overs with humorous insights, a technique that seems odd for the overall tone of the film. And there are at least two extended scenes showing the high school students dancing that had no business making out of the cutting room.

Ms. Swanks and a cast of largely unknown yet engaging and impressive actors make the film watchable. LaGravenese has largely been missing in action since his Oscar-nominated work penning The Bridges of Madison County and directing Danny DeVito and Holly Hunter in the little-seen Living Out Loud. Despite LaGravenese's unsure direction and caricatured performances such as the one delivered by snarling Imelda Staunton as the vice principal, Freedom Writers emerges as a middle-brow antidote to the "teaching to the test" modes that are so pervasive in our nation's schools.

Grade: B-