Detachment Review

Detachment is a 2011 American drama directed by Tony Kaye and written by Carl Lund starring Adrien Brody, Sami Gayle, Christina Hendricks and Betty Kaye, along with supporting roles played by James Caan, Tim Blake Nelson, Lucy Liu, Bryan Cranston, William Peterson, and Marcia Gay Harden. The film follows a month in the life of a public-school teacher (Brody) and the relationships he forms with his fellow teachers, highlighting the relationships between a troubled teacher (Hendricks), a naïve and damaged prostitute (Gayle), and a tormented suicidal student (Kaye). The film focuses on its central themes of childhood trauma and rediscovery of character and identity in a society perpetuated by the idea of fitting in and adapting oneself to achieve that change.

Firstly, this film is not bad by any means, but it fails to achieve any level of greatness. I personally felt a bit underwhelmed, as I am a huge fan of Tony Kaye’s film American History X starring Edward Norton, and while that film also has polarizing morality and an enticing message to say about corruption of youth and the everyday depression of existence, I felt its presentation and exploration of the subject was more nuanced and detailed, whilst Detachment presented ideas instead of a well-rounded thesis on its themes. It would be an apt comparison to say that watching detachment feels like watching a book report written by someone who read said book many months ago, so they are operating mostly on memory. The essence of story and characters are all there, but their ultimate purpose and central message is missing, even though there are certain parts of the film that feel a bit more towards the opposite, like a theme that needs to be expressed but fails in its ability to do so.

My first fault of Detachment is related entirely to the script. Detachment is written by a man named Carl Lund, a man who was, and as far as I know continues to be, a public-school teacher, and Detachment is not only his biggest writing credit, but it is in fact his only writing credit. While this does add a layer of authenticity to the film, his lack of experience as a writer leads to a devastating lack of believability. I’ll compare this to the 2004 science fiction film Primer, written and directed by famous indie filmmaker Shane Carruth. Prior to making Primer and his sophomore picture Upstream Color, Carruth was a mathematician and a professional software engineer. His knowledge of math and computers lent themselves heavily to his process of writing Primer and gave the film a layer of authenticity. Now, Primer was also Carruth’s first writing project, much as Detachment was Lund’s first writing endeavor, so why did one work so much more effectively than the other on the level of believability? I believe that the answer is quite simple, which is that while Primer is a science fiction film, which means that the writer understanding the mathematics behind something like time travel and writing characters who understand it too, Detachment is a drama, meaning that its basis is on human relations and emotions, meaning that while certain scenarios are indeed authentic, they feel unrealistic in the context of a dramatic film. A good example of this is the demise of the character Meredith, the troubled student played by Betty Kaye. In the end of the film, while at a bake sale, her character commits suicide by eating a poisoned cupcake. While this has certainly happened in real life, and most likely at a school, it doesn’t feel very believable and it feels as though its pushing the drama of the situation.

The other faults in the script either boil down to lack of experience or, as stated, authenticity over

believability, which while in certain circumstances can heighten the enjoyment and overall experience of the film, it works towards the detriment of Detachment. The films dialogue is one such problem that I relate to lack of experience, as there are many instances of dialogue filled with anger or sadness that isn’t necessarily warranted in the context of the story. The script is riddled with lack of proper communication, which although it could be related to the theme of detachment from one another, it seems more probable to be used instead for pushing the plot along. One such example is a scene which I will bring up again in another section, which is an argument between Henry Barthes, Adrien Brody’s character, and Sarah Madison, who is Christina Hendrick’s character. In the scene, Meredith comes crying to Barthes of her woes and painful home life and gives him a hug. As this happens, quite predictably I might add, Madison comes walking past and sees the two hugging, to which Meredith runs away, and Barthes begins to flip tables and scream at Madison out of anger for her suspecting him of perversion. This scene comes entirely out of left field and is completely contradictory of Barthes' character. One could argue that the buildup of traumatic events explain his outburst, but we have seen throughout the film how he does not deal with pain through anger, but through sadness and depression. The only other real outburst we see by Barthes is when he yells at the hospital secretary for not taking care of his dementia riddled father, but those are entirely different circumstances that led to the outburst, as it was a reply of direct negligence on the staff’s part. It is also important to know how quickly Barthes regretted what he said, waiting for the elevator looking entirely humiliated, an emotion completely devoid in the accusation scene. Another example of perplexing dialogue is in which James Caan’s character, Charles Seaboldt, enters his office and encounters a student who says to him “I am going to un-fuck your shit uptight, motherfucker”, to which Seaboldt replies with mockery of the line, singing it, saying it in accents, in an attempt to embarrass the student, and while this might be a result of his increased intake of pills, it again seems like a good idea in terms of authenticity, but a silly line that doesn’t make much sense in terms of character. There could’ve been a similar scene of him embarrassing the student for the line without it being done in such an awkward and bizarre way that would’ve heightened the story.

The second glaring problem with the script is lack of a single cohesive narrative thread. The script suffers what I call second act fatigue, where the main story line is not interesting or rich enough to occupy the majority of the second act, so it splits off into several different threads, none of which get truly resolved by the end of the film. I will divide the plot into two sections, stories that directly impact Barthes, and stories that don’t. the ones involving Barthes are his relation to Erica, Meredith, Madison, and his father, of which one of them is never truly resolved, and one is only suggested. The relationship between Barthes and Erica begins when he sees her on a bus giving an abusive older man fellatio, and then confronting Barthes for not protecting her when she slapped him. a few days later, Barthes sees her again and invites her to his house, where he gives her a bed to sleep in, food to eat, and he tends to her wounds. They begin coexisting as she grows further and further away from her lifestyle as a sex worker, and eventually when Barthes feels himself to be an awful person, he gives her up to a foster home. She screams and shouts and they eventually take her away, and in the final scene of the film, they reunite with a hug. There are of course many scenes I skipped to summarize this in its simplicity, but even including all those scenes, this plot line is very slim aside from it being cliché and extremely predictable, and it is likely the most interesting of all the plot lines in this film that are actually finished. I mentioned her screaming and shouting and I will discuss this further in my acting section, but the amount of yelling in this film is absurd. When I think back on this film, the images I most remember are that of people crying or yelling. The grand purpose of Erica’s arc is to help him come to terms with his traumatic childhood of his mother committing suicide, an event that is also coped with by Barthes caring for his grampa. The plot line of his grandfather is another which is finished, for the reason of his death about an hour into the film, but in short Barthes’ grandfather suffers dementia and it is implied that he used to be a writer of some kind, as Barthes leaves him a blank notebook to write in, and throughout the film he fails to do so. The final scene with his grampa is my personal favorite scene, as the grandfather believes that Barthes mother (his daughter) is in the room with him, and Barthes pretends to be his mother for the grandfather to say his final lines. It is an acting powerhouse with some very enriching writing. The plot line with Meredith is another riddled with simplicity and a fair bit of predictability. Meredith is an overweight teenager with a hobby of photography who is constantly bullied at school and misunderstood by her father. She finds safety in the presence of Barthes and that devolves into a romantic attraction to him (which is also not very detailed) and eventually asks him for help in her confused world, to which ensues the accusation scene. That night, she creates a giant mosaic from her photographs and commits suicide at the bake sale by eating a poisoned cupcake. I feel dirty admitting this but the scene of her killing herself made me laugh, just because the scene is presented as such. Meredith was standing in front of a table covered in vanilla cupcakes with a smiley face drawn on them in icing, and in front of her was a single black one, with a frowny face. She said certain ominous things like “you can’t have that one, its mine” when Barthes asked to have it and picking up a regular vanilla one saying “this ones better for you anyway”, which made me say to myself while watching, out loud “is it poisoned or something?” so when my prediction was proven true, it brought out a laugh for me. the predictability in many of the plot lines made me chuckle at several points throughout the film, but ultimately just led to a lot of the movie having little to no tension, and that is especially true with the Meredith plot line. The final plot line directly related to Barthes, the Madison plot, is simply never resolved. They share three scenes together, their introduction, a single date, and the accusation scene. Their romantic interest with one another is never solidified or contested, simply abandoned, even though Madison was written as a very interesting character with a similar haunting past.

Now, delving into the plots that are never truly defined or discarded, we enter the ones with no relation to Barthes. The first is that of the principal named Carol Dearden, played by Marcia Gay Harden, getting fired and her marriage being implied to be degrading over time. We see scenes of her being told she will be let go and scenes of her and her husband, Mr. Dearden, played by Bryan Cranston, discussing better times. These side plots especially concrete the idea for me of so much of this movie being sadness for the sake of sadness and drama for the sake of drama, or in simpler terms, misery porn. There is a scene between Dearden and her husband in which the husband holds a glass vase and talks about how they got it while on an exotic trip, and as I watched this scene, again I predicted “he’s gonna break it right?” and as though the film heard me, Mr. Dearden let the vase slip from his hands and smash on the floor. This plot line is never concluded. The last we see of the principal, she is crying on the ground of her office and lets the students leave school a few minutes early, and that’s it. there is no conclusion, satisfying or not. Another one of these plots is that of Tim Blake Nelsons character, Mr. Wiatt. This one is especially nonsensical, as we see Wiatt one morning holding the fence and breathing heavily before entering the school, a scene in which Meredith photographs him, and then that’s it. the next time we see him, he’s at his home, with a wife who ignores him and a kid who doesn’t respect him. we see him the final time doing the fence thing, but this time Barthes goes up to him and asks what’s wrong to which Wiatt responds with “oh, I didn’t know you could see me” and that’s it. We get no explanation or proper reasoning for any actions, leading to a profound lack of motivation from most characters. Another example is the plot between Lucy Liu’s character, Doris Parker, and Charles Seaboldt, aka James Caan. Caan is a pill popper and Parker is a counselor who is abused daily by students that she’s just trying to help, which again gets no resolution of any kind. The most development that happens is in the form of yelling, in which Parker yells at a slacker student, and again, that’s it. we see random scenes of kids doing criminal and otherwise psychopathic things to teachers or other students, which is never explained and genuinely feels like it was added either to shock the audience or inflate the runtime, because honestly the amount of actual plotting in this film would be better suited for a half hour short. There is a scene of a child kidnapping a cat and stabbing it in front of his friends, which Barthes catches him doing, and reports him to the principal, where there is a scene in which his parents berate him for being psychopathic. This leads nowhere and the student is never seen, heard of, or spoken of again. There is another scene in which a student bullies and threatens Barthes on his first day. The student throws his bag and Barthes calms him down by reminding him that the bag has no feelings and he doesn’t have any feelings that the student could hurt either. This student is seen again in one other scene, the one in which Barthes announced he will be leaving the class, and the student says how he was a good teacher, an almost comical level of development that occurred off screen. While one could argue that this is a demonstration on the impact Barthes made on his students, the themes of the story directly contrast that, and it still could’ve been delivered in a way that wasn’t so forced.

Barthes is frequently seen having flashbacks to his mother, flashbacks that after a while become annoying and serve very little purpose besides reminding the audience of what they already know. An effective use of flashbacks, for example, would be a film like Casablanca, in which every flashback reveals something new about the characters and plot, but in Detachment, the flashbacks feel unnecessarily sprinkled in, like they could appear at any time, which proves how little they truly add to the story. There are other weird elements in the film like a man named Vargas constantly calling the front office, and in one call his yelling is overlaid with audio of Hitler yelling, which makes a comparison that I think is bother confusing and baffling, besides being completely unnecessary. Truly the biggest complaint I can give to script is that there’s very little substance, and way too much time wasting. If one were to cut out all unresolved plot lines, unnecessary characters, and unexplained character actions, this movie would be tighter, cleaner, and hopefully more to the point.

There is one more thing I would like to add before I move onto the technical aspects, which is that the movie presents a lot of ideas, but no real thesis. It presents an idea of a world in which education is prison and all that but never gives a cohesive thought as to what it is trying to say about education or the basis of the human experience, and the details in the film do very little to explain that. In watching this movie, I made observations and theories about what the film was truly about, and after a while I was wondering if these theories I truly came up with on my own or whether they were ideas the movie was trying to convey. For example, in reflecting on the film, I wondered if the lack of parents was a way of saying how most of your insight and wisdom as a teen comes from teachers and how parents merely act as a force of nature, and it is true that parents are almost absent from the film, but then I remembered how there was a parent at the very beginning complaining about her daughter being kicked out of school, so that does away with my theory. I then started to wonder if the inclusion of Erica and this raw sexual force in his life was to show that perhaps Barthes’ mother was sexually abusive, which is why he feels the need to push Erica away from that life of sexual deviance, and it was why Barthes is incapable of real human relationships, romantic or otherwise, but I was wrong about that as well, as he later says that his mother was never actually abusive, it was just that she killed herself. Little things like that left me with a bad taste in my mouth, as the movie could’ve added all these interesting ideas and more, but instead just gave off a vague idea of pessimism.

Onto the technical aspects. The basic idea of the technical side of this film is as such. The film is shot like a documentary, so a lot of bad cinematography is excusable if it fits stylistically. However, even this decision to shoot as a documentary feels very inconsistent, as there are many shots that feel anti documentary, like completely out of focus shots of Bathes’ head, or editing choices like intersplicing Erica giving someone fellatio in Barthes’ apartment with him walking up the stairs. Not that these choices aren’t artistic or commendable on their own, simply that they don’t fit the overall aesthetic of the film. There are a lot of zooms that feel like they came out of a comedy show like Brooklyn Nine-Nine or The Office, and so in comparison to those shows, the former being shot in the style of a documentary but not implied to be an actual documentary, that shot would’ve worked. However, the film is very much implied to be a mocumentary, as there are shots of Barthes being interviewed about the experience. This shows that those specific shots are notably ineffective for that particular style of mocumentary filmmaking. The shots themselves felt like they were sometimes shot on a video camera and not on a cinematic camera, especially for 2011, which again is likely a stylistic choice, but style without reason is foolish. The shots themselves range from poor to great in terms of cinematography. The final shot, aka the one on the poster, is a very well framed and well decorated shot, but at the same time you get closeups that cut at the forehead and the chin, which could be implied to be an expression of the literal “detachment” from the environment and other people, but is once again used so inconsistently that I can’t give them that much credit. It is truly a very typical film visually, with mediocre editing at points, especially towards the end, and color timing that gave the film a certain comic book look which I don’t believe was in any way the intention. The one positive I can give to the visual presentation of the film was the choice to have the blackboard sketch out some scenes in an abstract fashion. it gave the film a scene of childhood expression and lost innocence that played well to the themes and tone of the story, but then again it doesn’t make sense narratively. One could ask themselves “who is drawing that?” and the average person would likely say that it didn’t matter, but I think it would work better in the story if it was shown that Barthes was perhaps an artist in his free time and the sketches were his. I compare it to a wonderful indie drama called We the Animals which is not was well known as it should be. In the film, the main character is prone to sketch in his notebook, and the film shows those sketches in an animated fashion to reveal his troubled mind, but in Detachment, it is used to show what the character is saying in somewhat abstract ways, but ultimately doesn’t heighten our understanding of whatever is being communicated.

The final element of this film worth noting is the acting. The acting is by far the best part of the film. I am a huge fan of Adrien Brody and I saw this very recently after rewatching the 2002 war drama The Pianist, and my love for his acting has grown tenfold. His embodiment of Henry Barthes is impeccable, and I find Sami Gayle’s performance of Erica as enriching as it is captivating. While I don’t find their characters particularly profound or memorable, the performance makes it so. Other phenomenal performances include Louis Zorich as the grampa and Lucy Liu as Doris Parker. The entire cast, aside from some mediocre to sloppy child acting, performs at the stellar level and I think most if not all of the praise for this film should be handed to the acting. This film was the first film role for Sami Gayle and to call it a breakout role would be an understatement. Everyone does a tremendous job and I cant give this film enough praise in its acting. Its not Network or There Will be Blood in terms of performances, but to call them great is aptly put

Detachment gets a 6/10