Culture Blues

Tribeca 2011: Detachment

For the next month, Jeremiah and Jeff will be spending almost all of their free time watching and reviewing movies from this year's Tribeca Film Festival. It's about to get indie up in here!

Class is in session, I'm Mr. A-Ranger.

Lucy Liu’s beleaguered guidance counselor sums up Detachment in a nutshell when, pushed to an abrupt breaking point with a student, Liu refers to the burnout’s likely post-high school future as “a carnival of horrors.” Yep, that’s Detachment. It’s like Dangerous Minds forgot to take its antidepressants.

Detachment follows Adrien Brody’s substitute-teacher-with-a-troubled-past as he accepts a long term assignment at a high school that’s apparently been collecting every child left behind. Brody is joined by an ensemble cast of fellow teachers and administrators including Liu, James Caan, Marcia Gay Harden, Christina Hendricks, and Tim Blake Nelson. With the exception of one killer scene from Caan and some protracted weirdness from Nelson, the ensemble isn’t given much to do, and we’re given little reason to care about these people, even as we’re forced to endure each of their assorted meltdowns.

A-Ranger’s well-drawn cynical substitute dominates the runtime, proving that writer/director Tony Kaye (of American History X fame) can at least create an engaging lead character when he’s focused. Brody brings his usual world-weary ambivalence to the role, shading it a tad darker for Kaye’s hellish vision of the modern school system. Brody in the classroom provides for some interesting scenes, if only because his approach is at once so astoundingly cynical and bizarrely humanizing. In fact, much of the drama around the high school is highly watchable, even if the students are often so repulsive as to strain credulity. It’s when tackling Brody’s personal life that Kaye runs into trouble, not knowing when enough is enough, and thus ushering in the aforementioned carnival of horrors.

Kaye clearly has a massive axe to grind with the education system – from greedy state government to absent parents; it’s all satirized without becoming intolerably preachy. His world-weary and embittered educators are too soiled, their struggles ultimately too futile, to win the approval of a mainstream audience, which makes the film all the more interesting. However, an insistence on sensationalism and an over-reliance on rote melodrama keep Detachment from reaching the level of enthralling social criticism Kaye’s going for. Buffeted as we are by the horrors of Detachment, we become as desensitized to them as Kaye’s characters.

VERDICT:  Skip it.