Freedom Writers

What is it Judi Dench says in Notes On A Scandal? 'Teaching is just crowd control - we should be a branch of social services.'

Imelda Staunton echoes those sentiments here, as an initially sympathetic school principal who becomes increasingly irritated by the dedication and enterprise of new teacher Ellen Gruwell (Hilary Swank). It's not that dedication is a no-no in itself, but Gruwell's devotion to her class of multi-ethnic 14-year-old no-hopers includes working two part-time jobs to subsidise supplies, books and class trips the board won't approve. This won't do. It makes the rest of them look bad.

On one level Gruwell's (true) story is a fairly conventional inspirational teacher movie of the kind we have seen quite regularly over the years (Roll call: Dangerous Minds; Take The Lead; Renaissance Man; Dead Poets Society; To Sir With Love; Stand and Deliver). Even if most of the authority figures on this list are white, at least this kind of film allows for some form of class consciousness, and Freedom Writers goes out of its way to try to treat Gruwell's on their own terms.

In the story's pivotal scene, Gruwell cracks down hard on a racist caricature with a stern reference to the Holocaust - until she realizes that only one of her pupils (the white kid) understands what she's talking about. Then, when she asks if anyone in the class has lost a friend or loved one to gang violence, everyone's hand goes up (except the white kid's).

By making them acknowledge their shared pain, Gruwell begins to break down the racial divisions that have ghettoized the classroom, a process that also involves them educating her about their lives. She assigns two crucial books: 'The Diary Of Anne Frank', and their own blank journal.

It's one of the movie's major shortcomings that writer-director Richard LaGravenese (screenwriter of The Fisher King and The Bridges Of Madison County) is evidently more at home with the top-down - trips to the Holocaust Museum; a visit from Anne Frank's protector, Miep Gies - than the bottom-up: dramatizing the domestic 'war' Gruwell's pupils describe vividly in their diaries.

Although he claims there is nothing made up in the film, LaGravenese doesn't remark on what has been left out. It's noticeable, for instance, that the movie is a drug-free zone - compare and contrast Ryan Gosling's wired, Oscar-nominated performance in the forthcoming Half Nelson, a much braver and more complex approach to the social and ideological minefields that beset the education system.

Unfortunately the film scuppers any claim to authenticity right from the get-go by sticking to the lazy Hollywood convention of casting actors in their early 20s to play kids of 14 and 15. If that age difference doesn't seem such a stretch, consider that when Erin Gruwell walked in to room 203 to teach her first class at Wilson High, she was only 23 years old herself. (Hilary Swank, of course, is ten years older than that.)

Freedom Writers (the terrible title come courtesy of Gruwell's real-life students) does make some valuable points about how to reach out to inner-city kids, some of which probably apply equally to British teachers. And for sure Ms Gruwell's commitment is above and beyond. But as Staunton's character points out, no education system can operate on the example she sets. Indeed, according to the film's own end notes, in reality she soon traded in the high school trenches for a leafy college campus - and, presumably, a movie deal.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com