Review of Detachment (2011) by Shanisah A — 09 Oct 2012

Through my many years of education, I have had some good teachers, a few superb, truly impassioned teachers, and a lot of teachers who seemed to have lost touch with the passion and enthusiasm for guiding young minds and sharing new experiences and ideas with their students.

These lost educators make up the world of Tony Kaye's "Detachment," an intense, emotionally exhausting meditation about the dilapidated state of education and its effect on teachers and students, and the altogether human need to take care of the ones we love and keep them from harm.

Henry Barthes (Adrien Brody) is a substitute teacher. He is a sad man who experienced loss from a young age and continues to experience loss of self every day. He is pessimistic, but at the heart of every pessimist is a disappointed idealist. That seems to at least partially identify Henry's situation at the start of the film.

Henry is starting work at a school in New York where the students do not respect the faculty and the faculty has all but given up. The very teacher he is substituting for ends up quitting while he is gone, and leaves phone messages in the office everyday, ranting and raving about the madness and dregs of the system. These fuming messages sound like sermons from a school in hell's deepest circle.

The rest of the disillusioned faculty includes the pill-popping Mr. Seaboldt (James Caan), the deeply frustrated guidance counselor Dr. Parker (Lucy Liu), Ms. Madison, a lonely teacher in denial of the severity of the situation around her, Mr. Wiatt (Tim Blake Nelson), who feels invisible to the point of emotional numbness, and Principal Dearden (Marcia Gay Harden), who will soon be fired.

Dearden knows of her imminent termination because a suit comes to her office to inform her quietly and calmly. She doesn't want to accept it, but it is inevitable, she is told. Her time is up. Later, when a real-estate.

Kaye weaves this aura of inevitability throughout "Detachment," from the inevitable demise of individual characters to the philosophical crumbling of the education system. The events going on in this school are a dramatized portrait of reality, and that reality stems from the fact that the film was written by former public school teacher, Carl Lund, who takes great care in offering up questions without answers.

Who is to blame for a failing school? Teachers? Parents? Students? The living environment of the students? Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions, playing the blame game, searching for answers that don't want to be found. That "Detachment" inspires these questions is a testament to its significance, and one reason why it should not be lost in a sea of forgettable. It's urgency and boldness have been criticized by other writers as "heavy-handed" and "self-important." But passion does not have to be dismissed, and Kaye and Lund clearly are passionate about their subject, and execute the story brilliantly.

More than anything, I think the school in "Detachment" is an amalgamation of a multitude of issues going on in public schools. Henry's entrance into the school is a breathe of fresh air, as his lessons and ideas actually start to stimulate even the roughest toughest students. These scenes are more sincere and straightforward than any like them I have seen. Like the film itself, they do not offer clean solutions but small instances of hope in a system that has lost its way.

An important story parallel to Henry's teaching woes involves a relationship he forms with a teenaged prostitute named Erica (Sami Gayle). Henry takes her into his apartment and lets her stay there. Their relationship is never sexual and always mutual. She wants someone to take care of, and so does Henry. He wants to help her, and treats her more like a foster daughter or niece, trying to take away her suffering and give her a new life off the streets.

Henry also tends to his grandfather (Louis Zorich), who is senile and dying in a hospital. As the film goes on, we come to learn more about their relationship, and understand Henry more from his tragic childhood to his efforts as a substitute public school teacher, a position that is not permanent, and allows him go to many schools with many different students.

Artfully shot by Kaye himself, "Detachment" is a powerful cinematic experience. Few films I have seen have pushed me right to edge for most of the running time, and then left me dangling at the end credits, only to drop off with tears streaming down my face. Brody gives an amazing performance, and everyone else is in top form. This is not a perfect film, but it does not strive for perfection. "Detachment" strives for emotionally raw, intimate portraits of imperfect human beings, and it succeeds. This is Kaye's best work.