If this movie had not been based on a true story, I would have given it a meager (we are talking less than 50%) score. Even with it based on a true story, it felt very cheesy, overly sentimental, and had way too much overacting. Its design evoked emotion and tugged at our heartstrings while making us believe that one person can make a difference just by caring. If this story were fiction, it would be utterly unrealistic. And, just because it is based upon a true story doesn’t mean that the real-life events played out exactly as they were shown in the movie. I’ve learned that “based on a true story” differs from “the following story is entirely true.” My most life-altering experience of this is Remember the Titans. When I discovered how many changes were made to make this story a more moving movie experience, I became very skeptical of Hollywood. Keep in mind that even though Remember the Titans came out in 2000, I did not know how glamorized Hollywood made it until a few years ago when I was surfing around the Internet and decided to look at the history of Virginia high school football. When I saw that the TC Williams Titans did not beat Andrew Lewis High School in the state championship game 10-7 but rather defeated them by the score of 27-0, I began to wonder what else Disney embellished in the telling of this story. It turned out that they embellished a ton. In case you are curious about some of the other inaccuracies of this movie, check out this link http://www.chasingthefrog.com/reelfaces/rememberthetitans.php. Even in 2014, when my top four films were all based on true stories, there were some inaccuracies in all four of them. These inaccuracies weren’t to the extent of Remember the Titans, but they also weren’t 100% true (especially The Imitation Game and Foxcatcher). This isn’t meant to blast movies based on true stories. Very often, these are my favorite movies. But now I do know to make sure I check out the facts of each film before I write its review. Now Freedom Writers isn’t nearly as good of a movie as The Imitation Game, Foxcatcher, or even Remember the Titans, but it is based on a true story that seems a little too Hollywood to be entirely 100% true.

So despite the above rant, it seems like a lot of what happened in the movie did happen in real life. This already makes me like the movie more. I think that it is remarkable that the woman who hid Anne Frank during World War II came to speak to Erin Gruwell’s (Hillary Swank – Boys Don’t Cry, Million Dollar Baby) students after her class raised enough money to fly her in from Amsterdam to Long Beach, CA. She talked to her students after Erin explained the Holocaust to her class (only one student in the entire group had heard of the event). She took the class to a Holocaust museum in California and arranged a dinner with Holocaust survivors after she had them read The Diary of Anne Frank, a book that she purchased for each of her students with her own funds. So this was cool, and I’m glad it was 100% factual.

There are two specific topics that I know very well and feel like I can break down as accurate or garbage regarding movies. The first is sports. The second is teaching. Since this movie is about teaching, let’s stick with that. When I see a movie or television show about education, the story, or the reactions to situations, I immediately dismiss it. I find it shocking how many teaching movies present scenarios that are so absolutely absurd that I end up chuckling with how unrealistic they are. And, quite honestly, there was a lot of that in this movie. As mentioned before, when it turns out that a lot of what seemed untrue ended up being true, I can’t question as much or laugh as hard. But, in the case of The Freedom Writers, the acting, I felt, was so overdone that a lot of what I saw couldn’t be taken seriously. Let’s go outside of the scenes specifically shown in this movie for the sake of argument. Gruwell had her first-year English class that was more than highlighted in this movie, but what about the other four periods she taught? Did she have the same effect on that group, or was she an utter disaster with them? I understand that you can’t show the personalities of all five of her classes in a two-hour movie, but was it more her teaching that transformed these students and their perceptions of school, or was it the personalities/needs of the students in that individual class. I felt like the only time we knew that she taught more than the one class was when we saw one of the cabinets in her classroom that had an abundance of writing journals (more than the 30 that she would have had if she just taught the one class).

In the movie, Erin works two other jobs. She worked in a department store in the lingerie section and also at a hotel as a concierge. Erin did this to help pay for the items that she used in class to personally teach her students because she was not getting the materials she needed to teach effectively. I can relate. I used my own funds many times on my students. I didn’t buy them class sets of novels as she did, but I also did not teach English 🙂 All kidding aside, I think it’s excellent that Erin’s father, portrayed by Scott Glenn (The Bourne Ultimatum, Courage Under Fire), was a man who seemed very well off and seemed like he could have helped with the purchases. Truth be told, he thought she was selling herself short by being a teacher in the inner-city. Regardless, she received no financial help from him. However, part of the reason was the need for two temporary side jobs was because she wasn’t yet a teacher! She was a student teacher, but this wasn’t noted. We never once saw her cooperating teacher/mentor. We were under the belief that she was hired three days before the start of school and that she saw her classroom for the first time on the first day of school.

So this group of students who the school has classified as at-risk, underachieving, future dropouts, etc., are assigned to Erin’s first-year students’ English class. Within the first five minutes, everything starts going wrong. There is even the start of a fistfight. Erin is definitely in over her head. But, to her credit, she never gives up. But the overacting, the rushed scenes without a ton of build-up, and the overabundance of characters hurt this film. Swank was fine. She was no Morgan Freeman (Lean on Me), Edward James Olmos (Stand and Deliver), or Michelle Pfeiffer (Dangerous Minds). Freedom Writers was another movie that felt like we’ve been there and done that with, maybe not a better story, but better acting and better lead performances. It just wasn’t the most memorable movie in the world to me. And I did have a minor issue with the fact that we never met her other classes, although I understand that there is only so much you can do in the allotted time frame.

In my opinion, there are better movies about educators who make a difference. You can skip this one.

Plot 7.5/10
Character Development 7/10
Character Chemistry 7/10
Acting 7/10
Screenplay 7.5/10
Directing  7/10
Cinematography 7/10
Sound 7.5/10
Hook and Reel 7.5/10
Universal Relevance 8/10
73%

Movies You Might Like If You Liked This Movie

• Dead Poets Society
• Dangerous Minds
• Stand and Deliver
• Lean on Me
• Coach Carter