Freedom Writers

Freedom Writers (Hillary Swank, Scott Glenn, Imelda Staunton, Patrick Dempsey) – If I were a cynic, I would be writing that this school room drama is a blatant rip-off of To Sir With Love.  A bunch of multi-cultural misfits and miscreants in a second-rate school with second-rate leadership is assigned a new teacher with brimming idealism. Fast forward – all the kids are redeemed; the teacher becomes beloved and changed; and another happy ending.  That’s the story.  But instead of being underwhelmed, I cried for half the movie.  Hillary Swank has won more Oscars than Sidney Poitier (hard as that is to believe), and she gives a convincing performance as the woman who follows her father’s example as a civil rights activist to join the faculty of a Long Beach, California, high school that, as a result of integration, has seen its academic standing plummet.  The students are mostly gang members trying to survive the day and assuming there is little future.  So instead of teaching freshman English, she teaches the promise of a life beyond the violence and the inner city.  Her method: force the kids to write every day in a blank composition book.  They need not share their journals, but they all do.  Suddenly, the journal becomes an outlet for all of the experiences, fears, dreams, atrocities, and feelings they’d never express to each other.  As in To Sir With Love, the various races, cultures, and gangs find out they have more in common than the differences that sets them against each other every day.  How they discover it is amazing – by being exposed to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust.  They read the diary of Anne Frank; they visit the Holocaust museum; they meet the victims.  They are galvanized through the passion of their young, white teacher and the truth of man’s inhumanity to man.  This is a wonderful sleeper of a film that is guaranteed to pierce your heart.  And it’s a true story with the tales directly from the journals that were printed as the Freedom Writers Diary in 1999.  Now, there’s a movie version everyone should see.