Tony Kaye (2011)

Henry Barthes – a supply teacher (the American term seems to be ‘substitute teacher’) – takes a three-week assignment in a Long Island high school.  It’s an eventful three weeks.  During that time, Henry (Adrien Brody) takes Erica (Sami Gayle), a teenage prostitute, into his home then has her put into care; the grandfather (Louis Zorich) who’s his only living relative dies; on the last day of the assignment, one of his pupils (Betty Kaye) commits suicide in front of the whole school.  Henry is an English teacher but there’s little evidence that he teaches English – apart from his reading in the film’s closing scene from The Fall of the House of Usher and, earlier on, asking his class what ‘assimilate’ and ‘ubiquitous’ and ‘doublethink’ mean.  He uses this vocabulary test to depart from the syllabus, to launch into invective about the mind-numbing commercial culture of America today.  Henry shares a surname with one famous French writer and Detachment opens with the words of another – ‘and never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world’.  The in-two-minds implication of the Camus quotation is echoed in Henry’s asking the class to define ‘doublethink’ (it’s the eventual suicide, Meredith, who supplies the right answer) and the whole film, Tony Kaye’s first dramatic feature since American History X (1998)[1], veers between angry elegy for the American public education system and lament for how impossible and unhappy human life is anyway.   The screenplay is by Carl Lund, a former teacher.  No doubt his anger and regret are well-founded but they’re conveyed unconvincingly.  Henry’s older colleagues (James Caan and Blythe Danner) are nostalgic for a golden age of state-funded education which prevailed during their own professional lifetimes but just about all the staff we see are struggling against personal disintegration.  Are their personal lives outside the school so miserable because of their jobs or to make matters worse?

Kaye’s and Lund’s two themes are illustrated chiefly in the personal history and the isolation of Henry himself:  he and the film-makers draw universal conclusions from his experience.  Detachment is elaborately put together.   There are cartoons that may or may not take as their starting point the Gerald Scarfe drawings for ‘Another Brick in the Wall’; swooping camerawork and subliminal flashbacks to the trauma of Henry’s childhood;  the doomed Meredith’s arty photography (which is so convenient for Tony Kaye’s purposes).  There are bitter, verbally fancy monologues not just from Henry but from James Caan’s jaded-but-still-compassionate Mr Seaboldt and from the school counsellor (Lucy Liu). The last of these is embarrassingly bad, as is the movie’s eventual dependence on clichés – which include the consequences of a teacher not being allowed to touch a pupil (also pivotal in the recent Monsieur Lazhar) and Henry’s change of heart as he eventually decides to take Erica out of care and back home.  (Kaye treats this bit perfunctorily – he seems irritated by the brief distraction of something good happening.)  There’s even one of the most recalcitrant kids on Henry’s first day saying on his last that he’s really gonna miss the teacher.   The suicide is familiar from high-school movies like Dead Poets Society although Kaye’s extravagant and garish staging of Meredith’s death is very different from Peter Weir’s ‘tastefulness’  The school’s principal (Marcia Gay Harden) is about to be pensioned off by the local authority after a distinguished career.  We see her husband (Bryan Cranston) dropping a vase to symbolise their shattered marriage.  We hear the principal’s voice over the school public address system and Kaye cuts back to her lying drunk (I assumed) on her office floor.  Autumn leaves and loose pages from exercise books blow together down a deserted corridor.  There’s no excuse for moments like these and no possibility of seeing them as anything other than meretricious.  Tony Kaye uses the social and educational tragedy of his subject as melodrama, as a pretext for sustained visual hyperbole.

In most respects Detachment is a bad and preposterous film so why did I find it so absorbing?  Adrien Brody.  His long, angular, melancholy face is a work of art – a Christ’s face – but he doesn’t act as if knew it.  I remember thinking, when I first saw Brody in The Pianist ten years ago, that the power and charm of his performance derived largely from my not having seen him before.   He’s very familiar now but I look forward more and more to what he does next.   Henry Barthes is a man who looks to have cut himself off from normal relationships (his sort-of date one evening with another teacher (Christina Hendricks) leads nowhere) and his experiences with Erica and Meredith, in their different ways, seem to demonstrate to him the perils of being kind to another human being.  There’s no arguing with Meredith when she tells Henry, ‘You always look so sad’.  It’s very helpful to Tony Kaye that Brody appears to carry a burden of cosmic proportions but that he has humour too, and his rangy gait is oddly comical.   Both the young actresses are good, particularly Betty Kaye (the director’s daughter), and there are other people in the cast who are touching (James Caan especially) but it’s Adrien Brody who’s the alchemist here.  He makes Henry’s scenes with his dying grandfather and reactions to something like Erica preparing a home-cooked meal for him beautifully expressive.  You’re well aware that the relentless self-torture Henry goes through is excessive yet Brody makes you believe it.  This amounts to doublethink of an oddly rewarding kind.

18 July 2012

[1] Or the first one to be released anyway:  according to Wikipedia, his second feature Black Water Transit (2010) ‘is still not finished as the production company went bankrupt during the making’.