A little while ago I sat down to write a movie review. About an hour later, here I am, still at a loss for words.
I watched Freedom Writers this past weekend, consciously timed to coincide with Monday's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. While the movie received lukewarm reviews ' critics said it was a story told a thousand times before ' this was one that stood out from the crowd.
Sometimes a film's message becomes more powerful than the film itself. The acting may have been excellent or poor; I didn't notice. The message behind it carried this film, and the story, empowering as it was true, gave me hope that perhaps harmony isn't so ambitious after all.
Hilary Swank is Erin Gruwell, a young, white teacher who is out of touch with the gang violence and racial tension plaguing her Long Beach, Calif., classroom. Slowly coming to understand the hardships of growing up in a culture of violence, which is something she hadn't experienced in her privileged adolescence, she gives her students something they've never had before: the possibility of a way out.
She gives her students journals, and in doing so, she gives those 14- and 15-year-old kids an opportunity to tell their own stories. By giving them an outlet to voice the hard lives they all share, the classmates, who once hated each other because of their racial differences, begin to understand that they're not so different from each other after all. Before long, they not only come to appreciate the teacher who gave them an opportunity to change, but they also learn to accept one another without concern for race or creed.
It's easy for me to praise this story from the comforts of this relatively progressive town. One could safely presume that the streets of Long Beach are a more tumultuous place than Athens, Ohio, when it comes to violent racial tension.
But there's a lesson in this film that extends far beyond one West Coast classroom.
The students learned that humanity surpasses color, and that we all face an opportunity to change our own paths and to alter the status quo for those who come after us. They came to see a little of themselves in their fellow classmates, and when one sees a mirror image when looking in the face of an enemy, it's becomes much more difficult to hate.
Freedom Writers goes beyond superficialities and gives insight into the dynamics of race relations in America today. Beyond that, however, the film is a lesson in a movement away from hatred ' not aiming toward tolerance, but rather toward acceptance. Tolerating people, dealing with them, isn't such a noble aspiration; it's not until we accept each other's differences in skin color, religion, sexual orientation or gender that we truly reach that utopian milestone.
The lone white kid in Gruwell's class attempts to sidestep the violence afflicting his classmates by avoiding the issue all together. In the end, however, he realizes that he too faces many of the same troubles that his black, Latino and Asian classmates do ' he's lost friends to gang violence just like the rest of them.
Like Ben, the token white kid in the film, it's easy to pretend issues that don't directly affect us don't exist. But whether we're on the fringe or in the middle of problems such as gang violence, intolerance or hate, we're still affected by them. When one person suffers, we all should.
This film's goal, I'm sure, was not to change the world. On the contrary, its aim was to embrace the world for what it is; to encourage us to find parallels between ourselves and those different from us in some way; to benefit in learning from people with whom we never thought we could relate.
Martin Luther King, Jr., dreamt it. In her own way, Erin Gruwell made it happen. Now, armed with the knowledge that at least one woman in California accomplished it, maybe more will follow her lead.
Utopia has never been so near.
17 Archives
Christopher Gohlke
KingG
