Freedom Writers (2007)

Richard LaGravenese's 2007 entry in the inspirational-teacher sweepstakes arrives with its moral ledger already balanced. Hilary Swank plays Erin Gruwell, a freshly credentialed optimist assigned to a Long Beach classroom where Cambodian refugees, Latino gang members, and one lonely white student regard each other across a demilitarized zone. The film assembles its cast with curatorial precision, a rainbow of at-risk youth positioned to embody the integration thesis before a single line of dialogue is spoken. The premise is diversity itself. There is no subtext here, and the film would not know what to do with one.

The pedagogical method on display is a sustained campaign of moral instruction. A racist caricature becomes a gateway to the Holocaust. A line game reveals shared trauma. A Museum of Tolerance field trip, a visit from Miep Gies, a Toast for Change: each is an engineered moment of catharsis, and each lands with the subtlety of a fire drill. The Anne Frank material is deployed sincerely and without revisionist mischief, which is to its credit, though the film treats the diary as a teaching aid for American race relations in a manner that flattens two histories into one lesson. The students learn that difference need not preclude friendship. They write it down. The book follows.

Where the film shows a flicker of something more interesting is in its treatment of its heroine's domestic arrangements. Erin's husband, an aspiring architect who shelved his own ambitions, divorces her for the crime of outshining him, and the film regards his grievance with a cool, unsentimental eye. The institutional adversary is not capital but a department chair, which keeps the economic critique confined to underfunded public schooling and petty bureaucracy. The end product is a well-made machine for the manufacture of uplift, efficient and sincere and entirely certain of its own virtue. It means well. It means well at length.