Detachment isn’t so
much a movie as it is a morality play.
Our hero walks us through the allegory: Here he is exalted and
righteous, and here he falls into despair after he meets seven deadly sins
personified by people in his life. Here is Wrath, who curses and threatens violence. Here is Envy, the girl who wants the normalcy that some people attain
so easily. And here is Pride, who can’t see the truth behind her inflated ego.
Our hero meets his sins, and is edified. He seeks truth and has found it on the
edge of his own redemption.
Based on the wording I’m using you’d think this would be a movie
about religion, but it’s not. It’s about another institution that has been deified
by its believers: education and its chapel, the schoolhouse.
The director is Tony Kaye, who gave us American History X, about another broken system (white supremacy)
and its many wounded soldiers. The star is Adrien Brody, an actor whose eyes
evoke such great sadness and regret. Together they have made a movie that will haunt
me for a very long time. Detachment is
not particularly easy to watch: the smaller performances are uneven and amateur,
the big performances are overplayed, scenes and events are exaggerated to the
point of satire and parody, and the camera work is … well, detached, with shaky
handheld footage and bizarre framings and coverage. But the film has something
important to say, and by the conclusion it’s screaming it in long painful
yelps.
Brody stars as Henry Barthes, a substitute teacher sent to a high
school for a month-long teaching assignment. This is a patient man. He comes
highly recommended. Everything seems normal when he arrives. The campus looks
nice — manicured lawns, no graffiti in the bathrooms, clean hallways — but the
students seethe with anger and violence. One student, in front of her accomplice
mother, threatens to rape and kill her English teacher. A bully verbally
assaults an overweight student in front of their entire class. In one sequence,
a girl is questioned by her teacher about her inappropriate outfit: “Can I see
your nipples?” the teacher asks. The girl shakes her head. “Then why did you
wear that dress?”
Hopelessness runs through these kids like a flash-flood, a
torrent of ruined ambition and pointless talent. To begin to understand the
movie, you must accept that these are exaggerations, that no school has this
many misbehaving students, and that no school has this many teachers who have
given up on them. Detachment exaggerates
the edges, it injects hyperbole in radioactive batches like a scientist
radiating a field mouse to see what happens. And what happens here? By amplifying
the in-class carnage, Kaye evokes the sense that this is a wasteland, a place
that will not be so easily fixed with more funding, better teachers or more
standardized testing. No, this schoolhouse needs a top-down, inside-out
renovation. Hearts and minds will have to find their way out of the mess before
anyone else finds their way in.
I’ve barely mentioned the Henry character but he figures prominently
into the loosely told movie, which often uses several methods to tell the story,
including narration, Brody talking directly to the camera, chalkboard
animations, flashbacks saturated with color — the film takes pleasure in
showing whatever it wants. Henry often visits his father, who’s in the late stages
of Alzheimer’s. On the way home one lat night he meets a prostitute, who he befriends and
takes home. He calls her a little girl because … just look at her. He goes to
school to teach students reading and poetry, then comes home to teach a hooker
personal hygiene and manners. Maybe in his mind he’s working both ends to meet
at the middle.
The film is less about plot, and more about moments. Like when
the English teacher (Christina Hendricks) walks in on Henry as he innocently consoles
the bullied girl. She misunderstands the kind gesture and nothing will convince
her of what she thinks she saw. Some moments are small: the district official
who suggests teachers juke their records, a teacher (Tim Blake Nelson) who
zones out by clinging to a chain-linked fence, and James Caan who makes
Shakespeare out of one student’s verbal tirade (“Unfuck your shit up tight, you
mother fucker”). In one sequence, a girl talks to her advisor, the lovely Lucy
Liu, who tells the student that her life will be defined by its many failures
and by the random men she sleeps with. “Your life will be a carnival of pain,” the
advisor tells her. Now that’s advice you don’t hear every day.
Ultimately, Detachment
is about teachers and how they’re responsible for what happens in their
schools. The film asks: If teachers take the credit at highly performing
schools, then shouldn’t teachers take the blame at underperforming schools?
Certainly, teachers do get a lot of credit, as they should — seriously, the
good ones all deserve medals — but this film doesn’t just blindly submit to the
cliché that teachers are all magical wishmakers. Teachers are just regular people,
and they’re subject to the same flaws as the students.
That might fly in the face of all the established education
movies out there — its nearest companion piece might be Half Nelson with Ryan Gosling as the teacher with a heroin habit — yet
that’s also why Detachment feels so raw
and so genuine. Now consider the alternatives: Recall Morgan Freeman as the
tough principal in Lean On Me. Or
Edward James Olmos as the calculus teacher in gangland in Stand and Deliver. Or Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds. Or Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society. Or Hilary Swank in Freedom Writers. I could do this all day.
These were great movies, but they assumed that teachers could
save a school. But what if the students didn’t want to be saved, and the
teachers didn’t want to save them if they did?
