Review of Detachment (2011) by Sara W — 12 Oct 2012

Five Stars for ACTING. As for the movie I honestly don't know how to rate it. Five stars or half a star? Were they trying for hopeful? If they were they missed it by a mile. I think the movie is realistic even if it was a little dramatized. I went to school in an upscale suburb of Washington D.C. Kids committed suicide from time to time. They sold drugs, they bullied teachers, they started fires in trashcans. There was a teen-aged prostitution ring. I knew a 14-year-old pregnant with her second child. And all of this was in an upscale town where new homes cost 500,000+ and people drove shiny new cars and worked for the government. I started high school as an honor student. All the crap in this movie is why I dropped out. The teachers were sad people who walked on eggshells and were despised if they cared. I despised their lack of authority and the fact that students could get away with being antagonistic to the teachers and pretty much all else. My German class once bullied our teacher to the point of tears. He gave up and left after that. I feel like going back and apologizing to all the teachers I left that year.

This film made me think I might be okay with not having kids after all. I mean, unless I move to a country where people naturally respect each other more and are generally driven to work hard and take their studies seriously, I don't know how I can prevent my kid from becoming exactly like me or worse. I definitely couldn't blame them if they wanted to drop out. Many countries allow students to enroll in trade schools at 14 or 16 and really, that's all I wanted. To learn something useful. To be allowed to learn what I wanted. I love to learn, but I did not love that four-year prison sentence they call high school. Some of my classrooms didn't even have windows.