Review of Detachment (2011) by Kenneth L — 05 Apr 2014

This movie has a great central performance by Adrien Brody, and parts of it are undeniably powerful, but it's also an incredibly messy piece of work that feels like it was adapted straight from the screenwriter's random notes to himself, rather than an actual finished screenplay. This movie just kind of throws a lot of melodrama and despair at a wall; some of it sticks, a good bit of it does not. I can't say it's a very good movie due to its extremely rough, unfinished quality, but I also wouldn't tell anyone not to watch it if they were interested.

The central plotline of the movie focuses on a substitute teacher (Brody) who is sent to fill in for a month in an English class in a rather bad public high school. There are a lot of subplots thrown in, sometimes seemingly at random, but they do all boil down to one consistent theme: the American public education system fucking sucks, but it's more the fault of parents, administrators, and children than of the teachers. Actually, the movie portrays most of the teachers as noble, suffering souls, and most of the parents as evil, stupid, vile monsters. This movie will make you hate high school children and their parents.

The movie has a whole bunch of great actors, but then proceeds to waste them with about five minutes or less screentime for each: Marcia Gay Harden, Christina Hendricks, Tim Blake Nelson, James Caan, Blythe Danner, Lucy Liu, and Bryan Cranston (BRYAN FUCKING CRANSTON) are all given a couple of brief scenes each (Cranston only gets about one minute!). Brody does do a good job holding the center of the movie together, and for me the most interesting and successful of the many subplots involved him sheltering an underage prostitute (Sami Gayle). The movie begins with apparent documentary footage of real teachers talking about their jobs, then just kind of lurches around from one scene to the next. It feels more like a rant than a narrative at points, though admittedly a fiery and compelling rant. This is only the second completed fiction film by Tony Kaye, whose previous fiction film was American History X way back in 1998. (He also made a documentary about abortion called Lake of Fire which I haven't seen yet.) Based on those two films, the guy clearly has an effective, angry, powerful way of talking about big important issues, but he could work on discipline and form. I don't demand that every movie be a slick, uniform narrative, of course, but in this case it often feels less like experimentation and more just like a straight-up mess. This movie also has some of the most laughably amateur lighting I've ever seen in a real movie - one scene in particular has Tim Blake Nelson apparently casting sharp shadows in every direction in his house. Who let that happen?

Still, as chaotic and seemingly random as this movie can be, I'd still say it's worth seeing as a realistic, depressing antidote to those inspiring-teacher movies everyone hates. The movie it reminds me most of is Half-Nelson with Ryan Gosling, which I thought was a pretentious mess (when I saw it 7 years ago, admittedly). This is also a pretentious mess, but for some reason I liked it better.