Movie Review – Detachment

Detachment (2011)
Written by Carl Lund
Directed by Tony Kaye

I was a licensed elementary school teacher in the United States for ten years. Before that, I was a student teacher & substitute for three years; before that, I worked as a reading tutor under the banner of AmeriCorps for a year. Altogether, I worked in public education for fourteen years before resigning from my position in December 2020 when our district in Tennessee demanded all students would come back into the building without any vaccines available. Tennessee has one of the highest deaths per capita rates from the virus in the country. I have a former colleague whose husband died within a week of contracting COVID-19. He was healthy and only in his 50s. I know of former students continuing to deal with the effects of long COVID. This was my last straw in education. 

After accepting so much shit for so long to have my life now devalued so that district officials could appease raving lunatics who refused to believe in the reality of the disease was it. Since then, my school has been spiraling. This summer, 13 out of around 35 licensed teaching positions were posted for hire. I barely recognize any of the names when I look at the teacher directory on their website. I have only been away for 3 years. The whole district is hemorrhaging teachers, not just between school years. After their Fall Break, my former school posted job openings for two licensed fourth-grade teaching positions. It is strange for a teaching position to open up a quarter into the school year. It was weird before, but now that will become increasingly normalized.

Public education has long been the target of capitalists in search of new revenue streams and reactionary zealots who want schools to aid them by indoctrinating children in their backward ideologies. You see it on the news all the time. Hate groups like Moms for Liberty swarming school board meetings, seizing seats on these same boards, and imposing their sick & twisted belief system on children. The acceleration of public education’s demise will ratchet up to a mind-boggling speed in the coming years. Eventually, children will attend schools built & run by Amazon or some other corporate entity seeking to mold future employees, not develop fully realized human beings. 

Detachment is a film with its heart in the right place, but dear god, it goes completely off the rails almost immediately. Public education in cinema has always been poorly captured, especially in American films. Even the “positive” stuff like Stand and Deliver or Dangerous Minds fails to accurately portray what it is like working in a school. Detachment is a movie that wants to pretentiously pontificate but never coherently lay out the dimensions of the problem. Instead, it chooses to be angsty & brood over the situation. I’m not asking for a phony positivity film, but something grounded in the reality of schools. The students do not need a photocopy of Robin Williams from Dead Poets Society to inspire them. They need to exist in a society that actually works to inform them of their humanity and their dignity. Instead, they are growing up in a world in which they are well aware of how interchangeable & replaceable they are by the capitalist machine. Why the hell should they try, given these circumstances? We’ve failed them.

Set over one month, we follow the lives of several high school teachers at an inner-city school. The picture’s main character is Henry Barthes (Adrien Brody), a substitute teacher trying to briefly connect with the students whose lives he passes through. Throughout the film, he develops friendships with three women who he appears to try to save. The film frames them as means through which Barthes comes to terms with his mother’s suicide when he was a child, as well as the impending death of his elderly father. Peppered throughout are vignettes with other staff (played by Lucy Liu, Marcia Gay Harden, Wiliam Petersen, James Caan, Blythe Danner, and Christina Hendricks) as they navigate a system that refuses to allow them to make any change for the positive.

I was shocked to see how many people rated this film positively. From almost the start, I laughed at how pretentiously the dialogue was written and how horribly Adrien Brody delivered it. If I was a student, I wouldn’t listen to this guy. He clearly has a savior complex, mainly because he brings an underage sex worker to live with him in his house. It is noble to want to help someone like her, and you are undoubtedly correct if you say the system is full of dead ends to get her help. However, it isn’t appropriate for a single man to bring an underage girl working as a prostitute whom he does not have guardianship or prior relationship with into his home. He could have found a female friend or acquaintance who would have taken her in, even a neighbor in his apartment building he knows well. That doesn’t ever seem to cross his mind and is one of the significant elements that took me right out of any sense of realism the film attempted.

We need to see more grounded movies about education. Tony Kaye is not the director to do that. I never found his American History X all that compelling, either. Both of these movies center on white men’s perspectives while surrounding them with women and BIPOC. I am more interested in the kids’ perspective, wanting to understand their view of the world in the future. A film in the style of Italian neo-realism would suit American public education, depicting life as close to how it is lived as possible. Gus van Sant’s Elephant did an excellent job of getting close to that tone, just filming the kids, not over-dramatizing the dialogue. 

There’s a troubling trend in American cinema, even in what you might consider “art house” pictures and especially in “issue” movies, to never show life as it is actually lived. We over-dramatize & exaggerate. In the case of Detachment, we talk so much around the problem that by the end, it’s hard to say what all these words even add up to. It’s a script where you can feel the writer’s inability to come to any sort of conclusion. “Life is complicated, and schools are a mess” could be the thesis statement. Yeah, no shit. Instead of coming to an eye-opening conclusion, Detachment wallows in insufferable self-pity. 

I include this in my “This is America” series because it highlights how the American media is incapable of portraying a serious social crisis with any honesty. The kids & teachers are detached because they are working in a system built on exploitation. The goal is not to educate anyone in the way most of us define that term. The purpose of schools is to warehouse children while labor is extracted from their parents and unfairly compensated. The children are meant to learn the baseline rudimentary skills to serve as laborers for the same ownership class their parents work for. This is not a system with a bright future at the end of it. There’s a reason “school-to-prison pipeline” has become such a regularly touted phrase these days.

It’s not an easy problem to fix and likely wouldn’t be resolved in a single generation. Providing “school choice” as the solution is just a means for slightly more well-off parents to abandon the public system in favor of a privatized one funded with public money but none of the transparency & accountability of public ed. That is the future of the United States; everything will be privatized, and the public good will be extinguished. Your child’s school will become like all the corporations and subscription services that jerk around their customers. The curriculum will be written by the oil lobbies, as it is in many instances right now. 

It wasn’t long ago that I had the opposite mindset, but today, I would tell any high schooler who can even moderately articulate their frustration with the education system to stop going if they can. That doesn’t mean to stop learning, but the existing system has been made impotent. The robber barons won. In a world where material wealth is the only actual weapon, how could any of us in the working class, atomized & split apart by hyper-individualism so that solidarity is a faint memory, have had a chance? Schools won’t teach children the skills they will need as our planet dies all around us. They won’t teach them the actual history of their nation, the endless parade of genocide. We should all be detached from such a system. It depends on our investment. Let it wither on the vine and die already.