#Freedom writers cast free#

Gruwell said all of the Freedom Writers graduated from high school and most went either to a city college or university. Much has changed for Gruwell and her former students in the last 20 years. The documentary, “Freedom Writers, Stories from an Undeclared War,” will be followed by a question-and-answer period and book signings by Gruwell and some of the Freedom Writers. Wednesday at the Crystal Cove Auditorium at University of California, Irvine.

#Freedom writers cast free#

But while we keep time with Erin, we also listen to the teenagers, several of whom tell their stories in voice-over.A documentary depicting what happened before, during and after the Freedom Writers entered Room 203 at Wilson 20 years ago will be shown free from 7 p.m.-9:30 p.m. The film pops in on Erin and her increasingly troubled relationship with her husband, Scott (Patrick Dempsey), and there’s a really lovely scene between the two that finds them talking ruefully over a bottle of wine about the divide between fantasy and reality in marriage, a divide one partner tries to bridge and the other walks away from.

Gruwell’s voice and those of her students, whose first-person narratives pay witness to the effects of brutalizing violence, dangerous tribal allegiances and institutional neglect. LaGravenese keeps faith with the multiple perspectives in the book, which includes Ms. LaGravenese, whose diverse writing credits include “The Ref” and “The Bridges of Madison County,” appears to have taken his egalitarian cue from the real Erin Gruwell, who shares author credit with her students in their 1999 book, “The Freedom Writers Diary,” a collection of their journal entries. LaGravenese carefully points out, a $27,000 salary) it’s also, emphatically, about some extraordinary young people. “Freedom Writers,” by contrast, isn’t only about an amazingly dedicated young teacher who took on two extra jobs to buy supplies for her students (to supplement, as Mr. If so many films about so-called troubled teenagers come off as little more than exploitation, it’s often because the filmmakers are not really interested in them, just their dysfunction. She’s an interloper, a do-gooder, a visitor from another planet called Newport Beach, and the class sees through her as if she were glass because the writer and director Richard LaGravenese makes sure that we do too.įunny how point of view works. From where they sit, slumped and hunched, some with their backs literally turned away from the front of the room, Erin looks like the stranger she is. The students are understandably skeptical, excruciatingly contemptuous. Turned out in a cherry-red suit and black pumps, her strand of pearls gleaming as bright as her teeth, Erin cuts an unavoidably awkward, borderline goofy figure.

She plays Erin Gruwell, who in 1994 was a 23-year-old student teacher assigned to teach freshman English at Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif.īy the time Erin steps into her classroom, a scant two years after the riots, the climate inside is at once frosty and scorching. Swank uses that neediness to fine effect in a film with a strong emotional tug and smartly laid foundation. In her finest roles - a transgender man in “Boys Don’t Cry,” a boxer in “Million Dollar Baby” - she plays women whose hard-angled limbs and squared jaws never fully obscure a desperate, at times almost embarrassingly naked neediness. Swank is an appealing actress of, at least to date, fairly restricted range. One worrisome sign is Hilary Swank, the two-time Academy Award winner with the avid smile who recently vamped across screens as a femme fatale in Brian De Palma’s period thriller “The Black Dahlia.” Ms. “Freedom Writers,” a true story about a white teacher trying to make a difference in a room crammed with black, Latino and Asian high school freshmen, has the makings of another groaner. Jackson makes like Charles Bronson with some bad students, it’s an argument for universal home schooling. Sometimes, as with the egregiously offensive “187” (1997), wherein Samuel L. Sometimes, as with “Dangerous Minds,” the 1995 film in which Michelle Pfeiffer uses her cheekbones to disarm high school toughs, the results are risible. As a cinematic subspecies, films about teachers working with throwaway kids tend to follow a predictable arc involving conflict and resolution, smooth beats and bitter tears.