“Everybody sit down and shut up, or I’ll start pulling out the referrals.
Sit! Sit down! … I am starting the DVD.”
I like this film much more than it wants to be liked. Detachment can easy be called a mess, though I love the mix of styles. It can be criticized for it’s acting, which goes from mumblecore realism to Baz Luhrmann excessive. It’s a tricky briar patch of a screenplay. On one hand it’s relentlessly painful and ugly and so broad you could claim that it was written as a satire of the public school system. However, it all comes together in a way where I was just in awe of some of the unexpected choices. Even though it didn’t present me with anything I could call new or original in a shocking way, the way these moments are captured are like bullets in my brain.
This is the work of Tony Kaye (American History X), who by reputation must be one of the most difficult and frustrating directors to work for. There’s a sense that he tried to sabotage the film with ambition and passion. Performances have to go big but they also click with an inner life we don’t get to see. For example, James Caan is introduced parroting one kid’s profane rant back with a variety of accents with the camera right against his face. Caan is one of many “what are they doing here?” cast that includes Blythe Danner, Bryan Cranston, Lucy Liu, Christina Hendricks, William Petersen and Marcia Gay Harden. I assume they’re here to support Adrien Brody, who also produced, and I also assume a good deal of their work didn’t make the final cut.
“Doublethink. To deliberately believe in lies, while knowing they’re false.”
As for Brody, he’s sensational, holding together the doublethink of acting like he doesn’t care, while caring too much. This plays out in three areas, with a student who sees him as a ray of decency, his father who is in the final stages of advanced age and an underage prostitute who forms a relationship with Brody that’s not typical of how movies handle such situations. These three relationships give Brody a lot to work with (though the father is perhaps one story too much) and that’s on top of the regular classroom scenes. It’s remarkable how a film so unbalanced gets right to the heart of matters multiple times. One of the messiest films I’ve ever engaged in on a primal level.
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