Photo Source: Tony Kaye
With “Detachment,” Kaye turns his dark lens on an inner-city school in Queens, N.Y. The troubled public school system has always been ripe for commentary on the big screen. Think “The Blackboard Jungle” or “Dangerous Minds.” But in Kaye’s tortured vision, the classroom and its environs become a metaphor for an existential hell.
Henry Barthes (Adrien Brody) is an emotionally disenfranchised, lost soul who ekes out a living as a substitute schoolteacher. As the film opens, he has taken an interim gig in a downtrodden school whose students come from indifferent, neglectful, or abusive families. The kids have no interest in studying and even less of an investment in their future, but on some level they relate to Henry, and under his tutelage a few pupils even flourish. The most prominent example is a seriously overweight girl (Betty Kaye, the director’s daughter) who is bullied by her classmates and ridiculed by her father. Thanks to Barthes’ understanding, she emerges from her shell and displays talent as a photographer.
Not since “The Pianist” has Brody delivered a more multilayered performance. Besides grappling with his teaching stint, he is sheltering a teenage prostitute (Sami Gayle) whom he met on a bus and coming to terms with a terminally ill grandfather (Louis Zorich) who suffers from dementia. Barthes’ private despair is surpassed only by his compassion for the suffering of others.
All the performances are wonderful, even in small roles. In the main parts, Marcia Gay Harden, as the school’s failing principal, wholly evokes a seemingly high-functioning executive who desperately clings to an unsatisfying job because it defines her identity. James Caan is dead-on as the school’s smart-ass veteran teacher, whose celebration of hopelessness is at once profoundly sad and oddly funny. Tim Blake Nelson is splendid as an instructor who is slowly unraveling in the face of his meaningless career and even more deadly family life. Gayle combines the street toughness and inner fragility of a runaway hooker. Kaye, making her film debut, is a revelation as an unhappy kid who misconstrues her teacher’s kindness for love. It’s devastating. Carl Lund’s script is most successful in detailing Barthes’ skewed relationship with the two girls.
But heavy-handedness is a problem. The story makes its nihilistic points without embellishment. An opening sequence of real teachers talking directly to the camera about their dead-end careers and the protagonist’s references to existential authors are overkill. Similarly, as visually striking as the picture is—it’s stylistically impressive—the final surreal scene of destruction and waste is redundant. Nonetheless, “Detachment” is an original film that stays with you long after you’ve left the theater.
Genre: Drama
Director: Tony Kaye
Writer: Carl Lund
Cast: Adrien Brody, Marcia Gay Harden, Christina Hendricks, William Petersen, Bryan Cranston, Tim Blake Nelson, Betty Kaye, Sami Gayle, Lucy Liu, Blythe Danner, James Caan
