By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — There is a genre of movie that brings a new teacher to a distressed high school, and through the force of his or her caring, students who formerly were indifferent or even hostile to learning are turned around and propelled into brighter futures. To Sir With Love and Stand and Deliver are two examples that come immediately to mind.
Now comes Detachment, which appears to start off in that vein, but very quickly breaks the mold, offering us a far-more realistic and at times heart-breaking assessment of the corrosive impact that poverty, violence, and uninvolved parents have on both the students and the staffs of non-performing public schools.
Like any good movie, this one by Tony Kaye has its layers. Through exposure to his own family background and childhood, we learn why the protagonist, teacher Henry Barthes (Adrien Brody) is seemingly so withdrawn, detached, cool, commitment-free and so seemingly unperturbed by violence or the madness around him.
We see how demoralized the principal (Marcia Gay Harden) and the school’s teachers and staff members (Christina Hendricks, James Caan, Blythe Danner, Lucy Liu, William Peterson and Tim Blake Nelson) are after years and years of banging their heads against an immovable, impenetrable wall of student and community indifference.
And we see how two young, thrown-away girls–one a teen prostitute (Sami Gayle), the other a bullied, would-be photographer and artist (Betty Kaye, daughter of the director) –make an impact on Barthes’ life and he on theirs. One girl’s encounter with him leads to her likely redemption; the other’s to her ruin.
This is a thoughtful cinematic essay about a broken education system as well as a jeremiad against child abuse and neglect.
On another level, the movie is interesting because it allows an all-star cast so familiar to us through signature roles on television or in the movies to be seen in completely different contexts.
The star, Adrien Brody, of course, is remembered for his Oscar-winning performance in The Pianist, a Holocaust tale in which a Nazi officer who loves music finds compassion in the closing days of the war for an escaped Jewish pianist.
Sami Gayle currently can be seen as the teen-aged, good-girl granddaughter in the television series Blue Bloods, starring Tom Selleck.
James Caan was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Sonny Corleone in The Godfather.
Christina Hendricks has been nominated twice for an Emmy for her role as Joan Harris, the head advertising agency secretary in Mad Men. William Peterson was the long-running chief of television’s original CSI series.
Detachment has been making the rounds of film festivals around the world and will arrive in San Diego on March 30 at the Reading Cinemas Gaslamp 15.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com