Movie Review: Detachment: American Education, Through The Lens ...

Detachment, the third feature film from Tony Kaye (American History X), is an indulgent, sophomoric dribble that wastes its handful of good actors in a meandering, pointless, and relentlessly cynical story about public schools. The movie opens with confessional style footage of what we can only assume are real teachers, explaining how they happened into the profession. Notice, no one really wants to be in the classroom; that?s because Kaye has edited his reality to turn American educational system into one long Jerry Springer episode. It?s not that the issues Kaye tries to take up (or cram) into his movie aren?t among the challenges facing education (fighting, sex, suicide, malaise, and angst). It?s just that, rather than an honest look at our society?s grime,?Detachment offers us a cartoonish, violent world drawn in scribbled black-and-white.

The star is Adrian Brody, who plays Henry Barthes, a preposterously over romanticized bore, a substitute teacher who rides from classroom to classroom like some lone wolf gunslinger. His holsters are packed with literary maxims and a laid back, cool guy ?detachment? that is tailor-fit to the rough and tumble youth of Kaye?s place-less high school. In the classrooms, he handles the kids by staying honest and sincere. At night, he wanders the streets of New York; visits his dying grandfather, who is wasting away in an abuse assisted living facility a half-wink away from the Ben Stiller spoof in Happy Gilmore;?and takes in a teenage prostitute (with a heart of gold, naturally). Throughout, we break away from the action to a darkened interview room where Brody mumbles to the camera, commenting on life in scenes as unnecessary as they are hackneyed

Around Brody there are some goofy extras. James Caan is a teacher-tough who keeps pornography magazines in his desk and gets in the faces of kids that mouth off. Lucy Liu is guidance counselor only capable of spouting off rapid fire statistics. Christina Hendricks is a softy teacher who we meet when a student spits in her face. There is some dabbling in the chemistry between Hendrick?s Sarah Madison and Henry Barthes, but nothing that ever froths over. Then there?s Principal Carol Dearden (Marcia Gay Harden), seemingly plucked from TV?s The West Wing, who butts heads with district administrators with dialogue that reads like a newspaper story about the No Child Left Behind debate. Between the failed poetics and the axe grinding, Kaye barely spends any time with the kids, who are all reduced to cut-and-dry types. It is difficult to see Kaye as anything but a puppeteer of statistics and caricatures.

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