Review of Freedom Writers (2007)
The writer makes the interesting choice of letting everyone, especially the antagonists, express some kind of rationale for what they are doing. This does not actually raise credibility because (A) people don’t talk like that and (B) some of those characters (Campbell and Gelford) are given poor rationales, to look like assholes anyway. It is especially strange in the case of the protagonist’s husband, whose rationale is a sense of emasculation. Because he is a relatively complex character for this genre, he knows how terrible this is, but says it anyway. It’s a clash between the desire to stay true to the melodramatic core of the genre and the desire to be a little more serious, in the manner of a creative writing class. The end result is kitsch.