Detachment
Hollywood has had lots to say about the American school system as of late, and whether you choose to believe the information presented to you via eye-opening documentaries like Waiting For Superman or fictional phenomenon's like Fox's Glee, it's clear that our educational institutions are out-of whack at best, broken at worst. No one has been able to depict this disheartening downward spiral quite like director Tony Kaye with his new film Detachment. In it, the reclusive auteur focuses on just a few weeks in the life of Henry Barthes, a substitute teacher who gets more than he bargained for when he takes a job at a fledgling high school, and in the process gives parents, professors and kids a much-needed wake-up call.
In this short period of time, Kaye dissects the contemporary classroom with unflinching realism. The grainy, worn film stock he uses for his verite' photography, coupled with topical subject matter ranging from child prostitution and teen suicide to parental negligence, makes the movie appear to be more a documentary than a narrative feature, but that's where Carl Lund's poetic screenplay comes in. His prose is simultaneously beautiful and brutal, effortlessly supplying existential excerpts for star Adrien Brody, darkly comic bits for fellow teacher James Caan and up-to-the-minute slanguage for the teenage students. He also uses this star-studded stage (the ensemble includes Marcia Gay Harden, Tim Blake Nelson and Christina Hendricks among many others) to touch upon the larger sociopolitical issues effecting our schools and children, lashing out at numerous initiatives/establishments like "No Child Left Behind" that we're led to believe have been implemented to increase residential property values instead of grades. Though the script begins to sound like a sermon at times, it's not intrusive enough to become distasteful. Quite simply, it's brazenly truthful.
However, excessive exposition can often hurt a film's momentum and Kaye gets unnecessarily sidetracked with the painful back-stories of his characters. Brody's Barthes is our central protagonist, so the sub-plot involving his aging, ailing grandfather is essential in defining him, but the filmmaker forces insight into the lives of almost every teacher (and a few of the students) down our throats. Individually, each vignette is heartrending but distracting; the majority of them have little connection to the main narrative. Collectively, they illustrate many of the problems that contemporary families face and, more importantly, create an emotional crescendo leading into the inevitably tragic conclusion.
The brilliance of this casual buildup to the film's climax is a nod to Kaye's storytelling aptitude. I found him utilizing the kind of in-your-face filmmaking tactics that Spike Lee made commonplace in his early movies, most noticeably with close-ups on a few actors who irritably address the camera head-on (like in Do The Right Thing). In addition, he intensifies the action with quick cuts and aggressive push-ins that elaborate on each character's crisis. Perfection clearly isn't his strong point; Kaye frames his shots sloppily at times and doesn't attempt anything groundbreaking, but maximizes the potential of tried-and-true lo-fi techniques. His stylistic abilities are second only to Brody's performance, which is subtle, sad and sweet all at once. We take an emotional and psychological plunge with the native New Yorker as he navigates a teenage wasteland of sex, drugs, violence and depression, but it's all just another day at school to America's urban youth.
Long absent since his freshman feature American History X, Detachment is a welcome return for Tony Kaye, whose commitment to the integrity of this story is marked by unrelenting bleakness in its tone and uncensored cynicism regarding the state of our schools. He doesn't portray every educator as a saint or every student as a sinner; through Brody, he imparts on us the uneasy truth about the direct correlation between our failure as parents and the failure our children: we're one and the same. The true genius in his film is not represented in the text of his commentary, but in his ability to forge an explanatory mosaic from his characters' varying but related points of view. Because of this, there are multiple mini-narratives that run through Detachment and all of them are worthy of your attention.
Hollywood.com rated this film 4 stars.