![]() The lesson that he, and we the audience, learn is that even well-intentioned external help from a place of social power may have consequences based on a lack of empathy and understanding. In essence, he never wanted to save his students from their poverty, but from their identities of color, supplanting himself as a superior role model when there is nothing inherently superior about his role in their lives or how he lives his own. What Dan doesn’t realize at first is that he operates on an unexamined prejudice wherein he automatically assumes that, even though both influences in Drey’s life are involved in illegal and harmful drug use, he is the superior influence because he is white. Dan starts to become more involved in Drey’s life as he sees a bright and inquiring mind begin to develop, but he also sees her becoming more involved herself with a local drug dealer ( Anthony Mackie). ![]() What results is a narrative that seems explicitly targeted at subverting and re-examining White Savior tropes as they still exist today. However, not everything is sunny in Dan’s life, as he deals with the pressures of his position by resorting to cocaine, which one of his students, Drey ( Shareeka Epps), catches him smoking in the locker room one day. Our protagonist is Dan Dunne ( Ryan Gosling), a white teacher at an inner city school who excels at teaching his students-primarily students of color-necessary critical thinking skills despite the administration’s push for him to stick to a particularized curriculum. Their first narrative feature film-which technically only Fleck directed, but Boden co-wrote-is 2006’s Half Nelson, a story as removed from the cosmos as they come, yet not any less universally relevant. What about Boden’s and Fleck’s previous films could inform the take on Captain Marvel that Marvel Studios is looking for? After all, their previous films have all been relatively small-scale productions, grounded in human conflicts and aren’t even action movies, let alone the sci fi action fare that Captain Marvel is assuredly going to be. When Marvel Studios announced that the upcoming Captain Marvel, the first Marvel film to star a female lead and acting as a holdover between two Avengers films, would be directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the internet reacted with a resounding “…Huh.” Of course, there was the laudable praise for the choice to place a woman in a co-director’s chair of a female-led superhero film, but there hasn’t been a whole lot of discussion about why Boden and Fleck are potentially a good fit for the material. ![]()
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