Brave the Dark
It’s easy to be cynical about the inspiring melodrama because of its tendency (like the sports film or romantic comedy) to fall into formula and offer little surprise or insight, but that misses the point of the genre. Building towards insight and ideas, or offering surprises in form or character action are all good things and great films make the most of them. But there is also an argument to be made around the feeling a film can impart as much as what it makes us think about; a desire to do more than we have done and that the difficult is possible. Anyone can take this too far, creating something sentimental and manipulative and calling it a day, and that laziness has tainted the inspirational film like few other types as it is dipped into easily and often. It’s just as hard, if not harder, to create something truly meaningful while also taking the long way round to get there. You’ve got to put the work in.
Stan Deen (Harris) knows this, as he’s tried to live it as much as possible. Not in the direct method of family and children most pick, but through the larger group of kids who come through his high school classroom and to whom he’s nudged somewhat in the right direction. And he’s succeeded beyond his dreams, surrounded by a town of adults of all ages who feel they owe something to him for their lives. None of them, however, were the challenge of Nate Williams (Hamilton), a seemingly normal young student athlete with a slightly too possessive attitude to his girlfriend (Bhasin) and some unhealthy friendships. When Nate is arrested after those friends decide it would be cool to rob a drugstore the depths of tragedy and loss Nate has barely been treading water above become apparent, with only Stan willing to step up and do something about it.
Yes, these sorts of things have a formula. Actually, they have a few: sometimes the teacher helps his students (maybe over a long time period) to their best lives and approbation like Mr. Chips or Mr. Holland; sometimes he tries to intervene around a student’s personal problems and pays the personal price for doing the right thing (and frequently a pathway to Oscar glory). Whichever it is, the form is settled enough that the joy tends to come in the moments between teacher and student rather than any surprise around the shape of the relationship except revelations around any one individual’s trauma. Brave the Dark threads the needle between these various options, building itself around the revelation of Nate’s circumstance and the reminder how difficult it is to guess what any person is going through in their life and the need for grace.
Which may as well be Stan’s middle name, standing for Nate’s good character despite barely knowing him and using his connections to get Nate released into his custody to give him the one thing Nate has never had before … a caring and steady home. It’s a direction which relies entirely on student and teacher’s dynamic. In the hands of an experienced actor like Harris (working for his older brother Damian) it works tremendously, hitting just the right notes of pathos and concern without moving into the area of sentimentality the genre gets described as without always being. He is matched with Hamilton who combines pain and menace in a humanistic package which feels real, particularly as the realities of his past and how it compares with his relationship with Tina spill out into the open.
Is it the most original take on this kind of material? No. Does it need to be? No. Co-writer / director Damian Harris (Bad Company) wisely focuses on the heart and reality of his two characters and ignored whether the conventions of the form have been obeyed. It really is the journey and not the destination and Brave the Dark, for all its trauma and convention, is a journey worth taking.