Watched: Detachment
Observations:
- This was bleak, but good. I don’t teach, but I do speak to hundreds of students every week, and there’s a certain wall you encounter time and time again with a lot of them. It’s not just students, either - people have a tendency to prefer being brash, or offensive, or funny over genuinely sharing an emotional connection.
- This wasn’t Freedom Writers (and that’s a good thing). It had the occasional touch of it - failing school, shithead kids, a stressed out teacher, occasional moments of profundity - but there are no easy solutions in this film. Bad stuff happens to good people.
- It was hard to tell what the film wanted to be sometimes. Adrien Brody executive-produced, and easily is the most visible presence, but you’re really pushed to get inside the head of every character - Brody’s is just the fuller portrait. It has a rich, slightly confused message - the narration talks about failure following a brief flicker of success - and it’s very earnest in trying to get that across.
- If you don’t like the sound of Brody’s voice, or films that unfold more like poetry than gritty realism, you’ll hate this. Every line was perfect, but not normal. It almost felt like a bunch of actors using prose to flesh out the characters that they were (coincidentally) pretending to be. I haven’t seen anything like this in a while.
- Not everyone’s cup of tea, but the pensive, pretentious version of me loved this.