Click to watch

Trailer for "Freedom Writers"

The presence of the slasher retread Black Christmas in local theaters is the only thing that stands in the way of Freedom Writers winning the Most Clichéd Film of the Year Award. The fact that it belongs to a less wretched genre doesn’t make it terribly more interesting, unless you’ve made it through your life without ever seeing a movie about a dedicated white liberal teacher reaching out to underprivileged students. In this case, the DWLT is Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank, proof that two Oscars is no guarantee of good parts), whose first assignment in the mid 1990s takes her to the Long Beach section of Los Angeles. Racial tensions are at a peak shortly after the LA riots, and while Long Beach isn’t exactly the inner city, Wilson High has a policy of voluntary integration. Her students, generally classified as “unteachable,” are the worst of the worst, gang members with no more ambition than to make it through the day alive. (It’s hard to even describe the story without sinking into clichés.) Desperate for a way to reach them, she hits pay dirt by making them read The Diary of Anne Frank and then encouraging them to start their own diaries. The fact that Freedom Writers is based on a true story doesn’t make it any less familiar, not in the wake of Dangerous Minds, Coach Carter, Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me, ad infinitum. Swank plays the part with so much unalloyed spunk that she seeks to be auditioning for a big-screen adaptation of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, while her young charges are played by an assortment of model-fresh twentysomethings who resemble gang members about as much as I resemble Jessica Simpson. Freedom Writers may seem original to teens too young to have encountered the material before, but then, so does heavy metal.