![]() ![]() ![]() One misguided reviewer failed to understand how the film could equate the Rodney King riots to the Holocaust, but the point was missed - it is the racial profiling of the Jews used by the Nazis to further their cause that Erin reinterprets for her students' culture. Her anger and passion make the kids take notice. ![]() Then, when she intercepts an ugly racial caricature, she uses the Holocaust as an example of where the insidious nature of racial hatred leads. A convenience store shooting involving three separate factions of her class creates tension she uses to break down barriers via shared experience. Two events finally give Erin the wherewithal to connect with her class. The shining naif is told by Eva that she is hated because she is white and by Andre (Grammy–nominated artist Mario) that she is expecting respect she has not earned. That is nothing, though, than the violence she witnesses both in her barely controlled classroom and on the school grounds. Seeking help for her curriculum from her junior/senior counterpart, Brian Gelford (Hickey), Erin is shocked to be brutally rebuffed. An excited Gruwell, bedecked in prim pearls, hopes to share her ambitious class plans and reading lists with her superior, but a condescending Margaret Vail (Staunton) smirks and advises lower standards. As LaGravenese shows us the everyday violence of the integrated Blacks, Asians and Latinos and segregated society they lead on the white's home school turf, Eva describes it, setting the stage for Erin's arrival. Young Latina Eva (April Hernandez, TV's "Law and Order," "ER") is our guide into the young teens' world, narrating an existence where simply leaving one's house makes one a potential gunshot victim. A well chosen cast of unknowns and up and comers flesh out the story with differentiated characterizations while Academy Award nominee Imelda Staunton ("Vera Drake") and character actor John Benjamin Hickey ("Flags of Our Fathers") turn old school educators into contemporary villains. By emphasizing her dazzling, toothy smile and can-do cheerleading style, Hilary Swank makes her well-intentioned misfit utterly believable. But then she opens her student's eyes by having them recognize the commonality of their lives while expressing individual voices in private journals and turns a class of high school freshmen into a published group known as the "Freedom Writers." As inspirational teacher movies go, writer/director Richard LaGravenese's ("Living Out Loud") take on a true story hues close to reality by using the real Freedom Writers' words and embracing the geeky earnestness of his main character. In 1994, brand new teacher Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank, "Million Dollar Baby," "The Black Dahlia") has an idealistic, squeaky clean outlook on her profession that does not prepare her for the reality of racially and ethnically divided Wilson High School. ![]()
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