Freedom Writers takes the road less traveled

4 out of 5 stars Directed by Richard LaGravenese Starring Hillary Swank and Patrick Dempsey

"Freedom Writers" is a film based on a true story about an English teacher who takes over a freshman class of kids with the poorest grades in the school and - it just so happens - a gang affiliation.

The movie made me cry at least four times.

I liked this movie way more than I wanted to. As the lights dimmed I was expecting your usual "it's hard to be a gangster and make good grades" tale and could already feel the yawns rising. But, as the movie went on I saw that it wasn't like the movies of the past.

For one, the teacher Erin Gruwell, played by Hillary Swank, has the kids read books like "The Dairy of Anne Frank." It's through literature like this that she promotes learning of things like vocabulary and grammar along with trying to stop her students from killing each other.

Throughout she continues to show the kids that their gang-related actions, like hate and bigotry, were eerily similar to the Holocaust. The kids were split into race gangs of African-American, Asian American, Hispanics, etc.

At one point, Gruwell's character takes on two extra jobs - selling bras and being the concierge of a hotel - to afford to pay, out of her own pocketbook, for new books, fieldtrips to places like a Holocaust museum and treats to reward student's hard work. Patrick Dempsey as the husband is unsupportive throughout and while he plays the role admirably, it's a minor one.

Most important of her out of pocket expenses is the purchasing of notebooks for the students to keep as journals.

The journals serve as the pivotal point in the movie. It's from these journals that the information for the movie was gleaned.

As Gruwell read the stories, and as it's reenacted, the emotional impact hit me incredibly deep.

One such scene is an eighth-grader recounting the day he was arrested at the age of ten. It was his first offense and he was plainly innocent. His best friend was showing him a gun on a park bench. It was to be used as protection from the gang-ridden streets. The friend accidentally shoots himself dead and the boy stays with him, shocked.

When the police find him, as he puts it, "All they saw was a body, a gun and a nigger." So he is sentenced to juvenile hall, where he joins a gang to be protected from the much older boys.

It's in scenes like this that the director Richard LaGravenese uses shocking, unexpected events like the sudden firing of a gun that really hammer home the way the teens must live. It puts you in a constant state of fear of not knowing who will die, who will get shot or beaten - just like the state these students live in every day.

The direction, which puts you in the state of mind, along with the moral authority that comes from clearly drawing the parralells with Nazism and gang life, that made this a really great story. Plus, the acting from all the teens, and as expected, Oscar-winner Swank, helped put this a cut above similar films.

If you're like I was, thinking this is another forced attempt by Hollywood to make you cry, then put those beliefs aside. It will make you cry - not heavy-handedly but because you genuinely feel something while watching this movie.