Review of Detachment (2011) by Angie R — 11 Mar 2012

We're living in a time where it seems that every story has been told, so it's all about tone and execution. DETACHMENT, the latest feature from AMERICAN HISTORY X director, Tony Kaye, vibrantly proves that the there's still beauty left in the telling. Pick your favorite Horrors Of The Education System film ---> Blackboard Jungle? Up The Down Staircase? Dangerous Minds? Stand And Deliver? We've seen it a thousand times. A well-meaning teacher tries to change the hearts and minds of a downtrodden group of schoolkids.

If that's old news, then you're in luck. DETACHMENT, while set in the same environment, feels new because it starts off the with premise that the education system is broken and then plunks a disaffected substitute teacher into the middle of it to shine a harsh light on how it affects us all. Adrien Brody is astonishing (perhaps even better here than he was in his Oscar winning role in THE PIANIST) as the embodiment of a primal scream. Like the Camus he quotes in the film, his character is living the existentialist nightmare of a man who knows everything is hopeless and feels he can't do a damned thing about it. Scene after scene, Brody is compelling, intense, and sad. When he lashes out at a hospital attendant who isn't properly caring for his ailing grandfather, you truly feel his pain and sense of longing for a time when competence was important to people. When he cries on a bus as a hooker services an old man in the back, he seems to be crying for all of humanity. His character just can't deal anymore with what's happened to the world.

Choosing a career where he can get in and get out without much emotional involvement, Brody's Henry Barthes presides over an uninterested, sometimes violent group of kids. DETACHMENT, however, isn't interested in the standard rehabilitation story arc. Instead, we're offered a slowly simmering series of vignettes, peeking into the desperate lives of his fellow faculty members, or following a student or two through their varied crises. Their performances are fantasic. Lucy Liu, as a harried Guidance Counselor, unleashes hell on a student in a scene that broke my heart. Christina Hendricks is a lost beacon of kindness, and evokes much sympathy in an otherwise underwritten role. James Caan and Marcia Gay Harden bring great conviction and humor, and Kaye's own daughter, Betty, brilliantly captures the loneliness and heartbreak of a student who never gets to have her good day.

One potential hiccup in the proceedings could have been the TAXI DRIVER detour this film takes when Brody meets a teenage prostitute and takes her into his life. The storyline is there to give us a sense that his character does want to connect with others and there is hope. It's pretty schematic stuff, but Sami Gayle brings such vivid rawness to the part, that you end of caring what happens here anyhow.

Kaye, service as his own Director of Photography, mostly gets it right, with a mix of black and white real teacher interviews, scary chalkboard animation, and a documentary approach to his coverage. I could have done without the fisheye lens perspective at times, as the subject matter is surreal enough without having to hit us over the head with it. A final series of images, however, redeem those choices, with a visceral and poetic interpretation of the decrepit wasteland schools have become. The score by the Newton Brothers deserves special mention, as it infuses the visuals and the great performances with such deep waves of emotion. Some people may hate the bitter attitude of this film, but I found it heartbreaking and filled with such a deeply rooted sense of tenderness and sadness over the loss we're all currently experiencing.

In a world where everything is spoon-fed to us, DETACHMENT is a sad, elegiac memory piece for a time where we used to have minds of our own. It's not entirely without hope, but Kaye's strong visual sense, his cast's power, and Carl Lund's angry script is shaking us and telling us to get our heads out of our asses NOW. It's a work of art.