Detachment (2011)

Detachment arrives with the somber bearing of a film convinced that the American high school is an open wound, and it spends its runtime pressing on that wound without reaching for a bandage. Tony Kaye directs Adrien Brody as Henry Barthes, a substitute teacher who drifts from classroom to classroom, dispensing wisdom and detachment in equal measure. The misery is relentless. A runaway teenager sells herself on a bus. A grandfather dissolves into dementia. A lonely student poisons a cupcake and eats it. This is a film that wants us to feel something, and it is not subtle about which feelings it has in mind.

The cast is white and the concerns are universal in the vaguest sense. Women here exist to suffer or to accuse, and the plot turns on a false allegation that lands with a thud. Race goes unmentioned. The environment goes unmentioned. Money is a problem only insofar as schools lack it, which is not the same as an argument about capital. Nobody in this film is on a journey toward self-acceptance regarding their body, and the dementia and depression on display are treated as private tragedies, not as the stuff of identity. The film is too busy being sad to be instructive about anything besides sadness.

What it does have is a voice, and that voice likes to talk. Characters deliver long speeches about apathy, about how nobody cares, about the failure of the system, and the camera holds on them while they do it. The effect is a sermon delivered to a congregation that already agrees. Kaye means well. The film means well. Meaning well, as the critics noted, does not amount to a solution.