Freedom Writers
June 2007 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

An uplifting "teacher movie" now and then does us all some good. Every few years another one turns up. The best of them become classics. Think Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), Blackboard Jungle (1955), To Sir with Love (1966), Fame (1980), Dead Poet’s Society (1986), Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995). A typical plot in a teacher movie: new teacher arrives; students resist him/her; stodgy administration disapproves of his/her teaching methods; teacher is tenacious and loving; students, usually at-risk, come to love and respect the teacher; evil administrators are daunted; students succeed against great odds.

What keeps the formula alive are the endless variations possible. Here’s Hilary Swank in Freedom Writers in yet another. She plays a real-life English teacher, Erin Gruwell, whose first assignment came at the time of the Rodney King riots in L.A. Young, naïve, and idealistic, she faced hostile multiracial students and a hostile white principal and turned it all around by getting her students to write about their own lives: their gang involvements, friends they’ve lost in drive-by shootings, violence at home, drugs on their streets, and the racism they confront daily. Gruwell collected their diaries into a book, on which screenwriter and director Richard LaGravenese based the script.

Besides Swank’s convincing performance, there is more good acting, especially among those playing students. April Lee Hernandez, for example, plays Eva, an angry Latina student who flowers within the loving community Gruwell creates in the classroom. Two surprisingly lukewarm performances are given by Patrick Dempsey of TV’s Grey’s Anatomy as the unsupportive husband and veteran actor Scott Glenn as Gruwell’s occasionally supportive father. Good actors both, but in big roles that slowed the central action.

Will Freedom Writers join the list of classic teacher movies? Probably not. Blame it on the script. As we learn in the featurettes, screenwriter Richard LaGravenese came to know the actual teacher well and perhaps lost the distance a writer needs. The script pays so much homage to Gruwell’s personal story that we never come to know any of the students well enough to care enough about them.

As a DVD though, Freedom Writers is technically impeccable. Although the audio is mostly dialogue (and it’s plenty crisp), the 5.1 Dolby gets some play with the punchy musical soundtrack and the occasional gunshot. The video is a very good, very clean widescreen transfer. The colors are luscious (I’m remembering Swank in her vivid red teacher suit and luminous white pearls) and the blacks are deep with legible detail.

The extras are a letdown though. Swank has won Oscars for heavyweight roles in Boys Don’t Cry and Million-Dollar Baby, yet she can sound surprisingly lightweight in interviews. Don’t expect much from her commentary track with Richard LaGravenese. For the others, expect the usual: deleted scenes, story-behind-the-story and making-the-movie featurettes, a trailer, and a photo gallery. Someday, producers will take the extra material on DVDs more seriously than they do now.

Feeling sorry for yourself? Down in the dumps? Go rent Freedom Writers.

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