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03/07/2012

"Detachment," the New Teacher Movie Starring Adrien Brody, is a Corrupt Film

I was looking forward to seeing Detachment, the new teacher film starring Adrien Brody and directed by Tony Kaye. With a very strong supporting cast (Marcia Gay Harden, Tim Blake Nelson, Christina Hendricks, Bryan Cranston, James Caan) and a compelling trailer featuring Brody as a tortured soul struggling to connect with his students, the movie seemed right up my alley. As a 31-year-old teacher and movie fanatic, I am Detachment's target audience; this should have gone well.

Detachment_Poster-1

Detachment arrives in theaters on March 16, but it's already available on demand so I ponied up my $9.99. This movie has all of the trappings of an intelligent indie flick--- stellar cast, relevant social issues, and a notoriously egomaniacal director heralded by some as a genius.

It's hard to know where to begin to explain what a mess this film is. With its contrived story, one-dimensional characters, and in-your-face stylized visuals, Detachment takes edu-hand-wringing to new, blood-and-tear-soaked depths.

As a film major at NYU, I watched many crappy student films; in fact I made a few myself. Aside from experimental visuals that don’t pay off, the crappiness was most often epitomized by a lack of authenticity in the script. For example, students made police procedurals without having a clue about detectives’ reality— they took shortcuts by guessing or basing their stories on other inauthentic sources. The results, intended to play as dramatic, came out flat or even silly. Detachment suffers from the same syndrome; the script feels as if the writer (Carl Lund) dreamed up the worst things that could happen in public schools, put them on steroids, populated the scenes with the miserable characters, then let it run wild. In Detachment, suicides (there are 2 in the movie) aren’t “shocking”— they are a naked ploy for manufactured emotion.

Kaye leans on his audience’s vague, negative prejudices against the public school system. There’s no solid story here; just a bunch of lost/evil souls and a sense of decay. Many details will ring false to anyone who has spent time in a classroom. On his first day as a sub, Adrien Brody’s character enters his English 11 class to find all of the students quietly sitting at their desks waiting for him. Then, after he makes a brief introductory speech, the kids suddenly morph into profane hooligans. Two curse him out and one assaults him, chucking his briefcase across the room.

The movie avoids the very real issue of de facto racial segregation in urban schools. In Detachment, classes are racially diverse and pretty much everyone acts like a deadbeat. The movie takes the easy way out of facing any root causes of public education’s struggles other than lambasting absentee parents— and in this community all of the parents are either absent or over-the-top abusive.

As the film’s centerpiece, Adrien Brody emanates handsome ennui. He plays Henry Barthes, a glazed out guy with no friends and trauma in his past who comes to a nameless urban high school as a recommended substitute teacher. He doesn’t get mad when kids greet him with virulence and he says a few things about how everyone is in pain and that literature is needed to defend and preserve our minds. All of that would be fine— Brody’s charisma manages to blunt some of the dialogue’s preachiness— except most of Detachment’s 98-minute running time is eaten by a miscellany of misery that ventures freely into exploitation.

In the world of Detachment, students are mean-spirited, profanity-addicted nihilists. (The one nice girl, played by the director’s daughter, publicly commits suicide.) Teachers are sadsacks or menaces: Tim Blake Nelson plays a teacher who can’t get anyone to listen to him at school or at home, so he hangs daily on the schoolyard chain-link fence in the crucifixion pose, wallowing in his invisibility. As an overwhelmed guidance counselor, Lucy Liu screams at and ejects an obnoxious student from her office— then weeps about it. William Petersen is a scary, borderline nonverbal teacher who in class shows Nazi images and glowers. Marcia Gay Harden, on the verge of losing her job as principal, delivers a public address announcement while curled in the fetal position on the floor of her office.

Outside of school, Barthes engages in various acts of sadness. He cries on a public bus, takes in and rehabilitates a teenage prostitute (a major storyline that reeks of cliches), role-plays with his dementia-addled grandfather, and screams in the face of a night-shift nurse.

The words “in your face” never left my mind during this film. Visually, director Tony Kaye, who regretfully doubles as director of photography, relies enormously on close-ups, often with point-of-view shots awkwardly placing the subject in the center of the frame. The effect is not arresting, but claustrophobic. Mixed in at tense moments are bits of crude chalk-on-blackboard animation that distract from rather than support the narrative. Worst of all, the film is peppered with cutaways to Adrien Brody  in tight close-up, his hair distractingly much longer than in the action of the film, philosophizing vaguely to an unseen interviewer about lack of fulfillment and generational decline. These seemingly improvised clips carry the intellectual weight of a freshman dorm bull session. (“We’re failing… we’re failing.”) It’s never entirely clear whether Brody is in character as Barthes or if he’s just spitballing.

It all ends with Barthes visiting the teenage prostitute Erica at the “Guardian Angels Foster Care Facility,” a verdant resort-like institution where they share a sunny embrace. Then he goes to school and reads an excerpt from Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher to a classroom that literally transforms into a ravaged wasteland.

My fear is that non-educator audiences will be tricked by the gravitas of Brody (“I’m a hollow man. You see me, but I’m not here.”) and the overall grimness of the story into thinking that this is a valuable portrait of American education.  One viewer from the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival probably cribbed Detachment’s PR copy by describing it a “gritty, edgy, shocking, and ultimately important film.” Hollywood.com praised its “unflinching realism.” Don’t believe the hype. This is a meandering mosaic of unfocused bitterness, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Posted at 12:03 AM in Current Affairs, Film, media, the teaching life |

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Thank you for this review.

Posted by: jim | 03/14/2012 at 07:51 AM

My comment is in reference to the quote below
"the script feels as if the writer (Carl Lund) dreamed up the worst things that could happen in public schools, put them on steroids, populated the scenes with the miserable characters, then let it run wild."

Before I started my career as a public school teacher, I never very little about what actually goes on in schools. It seems that you are not unlike I used to be, ignorrant to the ways of the world of public education. People who are directly involved in education, do not have the slightest clue as to what goes on inside of schools. I can tell you that I have experienced(first hand) these things are not dreamed up, they are real and they do happen.

Posted by: Kate | 03/16/2012 at 08:42 AM

The holidays operate on a lunar calendar, so they vary each year. Next school year, Eid-ul-Fitr is scheduled for August, likely before the start of the school year; Eid-ul-Adha would close school on Friday, Oct. 26. In past years, the holidays have coincided with state standardized testing, and officials have since amended school policy to ensure the holidays are nontesting days.

Posted by: louis vuitton handbags | 06/06/2012 at 10:17 AM

lol Dan Brown you are a douchebag. Your immense hate for this film gives me a hunch that this film was indeed all to real for you, so you deny it and spit on it. Maybe it reminds you all to well of your past.Go get a hug from someone. I thought the film was great. It seems that in your search to find weak points in the film you missed the entire underlying theme.

Posted by: GoodMovie | 06/13/2012 at 03:17 AM

well dan i can see by your blog the way it looks the way you write - you are in my opinion AN INTELLECTUAL WORDMAN - of course intellectuals will never understand DETACHMENT- intellectuals and emotional types - detachment is for people that feel - of course feelings and emotions are 2 completely different things - i'm glad you watched detachment , watch it again in 50 years , please god your here still and with a lifetime of living you can write a book about it and me and wrong someone can be . and by the way if you ever want your blog to be read by anyone other than your friends and family get it redesigned , you obviously have zero visual taste and know nothing about design . imagine if steve jobs had your eyes and mind ! where would we all be now . peace , tony kaye

Posted by: tony kaye | 06/30/2012 at 06:46 AM

i missed out a word

" how "

how wrong someone can be

Posted by: tony kaye | 06/30/2012 at 06:48 AM

also

the title of your book !

great expectations in the jungle of blackboards does a half nelson with 2 eyes ?

great title dan

i pity your students - the fucking unoriginality of your mind - the regretful shame of the evil eye in your bonce - jesus - wake up desperate D - learn how to subscribe to unique and INSPIRE YOUR STUDENTS !!!!!!!

Posted by: tony kaye | 06/30/2012 at 06:56 AM

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This review just baffles me.

Posted by: Anonymous | 07/31/2012 at 01:34 PM

Beautiful words, language processing appropriately, give a person a kind of new feeling, hope can see again next time so good article .
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Posted by: esowsMype | 09/10/2012 at 11:05 PM

You are nuts, Dan Brown. I spent one day as a substitute teacher in a Florida middle class middle school and I could totally relate. This film captures more than any I have ever before seen just what today's teachers go through and how much caring and doing a good job can take from a person. It also works on a thematic level -- everyone, adults and kids alike, are coping with emotional pain. It is only through connection that emotional pain can be transformed. You seem too pedantic and up on a high horse to have responded to this lyrical and gripping film.

Posted by: asw | 10/06/2012 at 02:55 AM

I suppose that the Tony Kaye that signs the two comments here is the director of Detachment. It is him I would like to adress.
Mr. Kaye, I surely loved your American History X. Although not finding it faultless, I quite enjoyed your Detachment. I cannot assess how much your film owes to reality in the USA, because i'm not an american and have never been in the USA. However some of the problems cited in the film are also european (I know as a parent the reality of schools in France and Portugal)
The question your movie arose in me is exactly that: the problems are cited not arisen, not demonstrated, not discussed, and all comes to a dead end. Also the kind of redemption suffered by Barthes at the end seems to me somewhat rushed up to say the list.
I would not have considered writing this if I was not an admirer of your previous work. Also I might have overlooked the opportunity if you hadn´t been aggressive and angry towards Mr. Brown, whom I've read for the first time and, although not agreeing with some of the things he says, find worthy of respect.
You are an angry man, Mr. Kaye, but you´re no longer young and should therefore have your anger less chaotic and more purposeful.

Posted by: graca | 11/23/2012 at 01:32 PM

Pls, read "least" and not "list"

Posted by: graca | 11/23/2012 at 01:33 PM

Thanks for sharing your view on the movie "Detachment". Well it was impressionistic cinematic approach right for a story about teachers?

Posted by: Film School | 12/25/2012 at 07:38 AM

Thanks for sharing your view on the movie "Detachment". Well it was impressionistic cinematic approach right for a story about teachers?

Posted by: Film School | 12/25/2012 at 07:38 AM


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Posted by: wzxacekcud | 02/21/2013 at 08:54 AM

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. It resonated on so many levels with me. The story lines may seem exaggerated, but many parents are extremely defensive of their children and would shudder at the thought of bringing some of those characters into the world. Unfortunately this is the reality, parents are often times too busy to give their children the attention they need or any attention at all. we as teachers not only teach subject matter but manners, morals, motivation and self esteem. If parents did their jobs effectively students would gain far more out of their education unless they attend the few private schools available. In the first four weeks at my new school I was verbally abused 28 times and had 32 walk outs. Lack of community and old fashioned values are breeding a generation or neglected, anrgy, needy yet selfish lazy morons. Some lucky teachers do not have the honor of meeting these students but this is where teachers make a 'difference'.

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    Dan Brown is a teacher and the author of The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle. His writing has also appeared in the Boston Globe, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and Education Week. He currently teaches high school English at a charter school in Southeast Washington, DC. Dan Brown did not write The Da Vinci Code, and he is okay with that.

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  • The Teacher Leaders Network is a diverse community of accomplished teachers from across the United States. TLN is supported by the Center for Teaching Quality as part of its mission to cultivate teacher voice around important matters of education policy and teaching practice. The views expressed on this page are those of the individual author or authors and not necessarily the Center for Teaching Quality.