Detachment (2011)

An interesting and challenging theme doesn't necessarily result in a good movie. Detachment (dir. Tony Kaye) tries to address an important topic - how do we respond to a person who obviously needs help? - but it does so in a way that I thought was both clumsy and a bit insensitive to what it appeared to be saying. Detachment revolves around the messy but strangely sterile (yes, it's a paradox) life of a substitute teacher. The school he works in is a mess: we get the sense that the public school is going down the drain, the teachers being a tormented bunch and the students enduring the school-day in a state varying from rowdy protests to glass-eyed disengagement. The substitute teacher is used to work in a place for a short term only. A merit of the film is that it abstain from portraying the teacher as some sort of social hero that saves the fate of the young generation by sermoning a few lines of classical poetry. What makes Detachment a not-catastrophic film (admittedly, it's a border-case) is that the teacher remains a sort of mystery. Most of the time, he is sympathetic, trying to help, trying to do his best. But all the time there is something aloof about him, his engagement always somehow held in check. Maybe the film is a portrayal of what depression may be like. On the downside, the approach to the material is at times incredibly heavy-handed and some scenes are so eager to deliver Message that it is almost painful to keep watching. Most characters remain paper dolls (extremely dramatized and obnoxious paper dolls, it doesn't help). There are so many things that go wrong in this movie - the attempts at artistic imagery are pretty embarrassing and the moments of "social realism" don't feel exactly authentic. Detachment tries so hard to wring out Emotions that it ends up making this viewer quite resistant to feeling anything; instead of images that somehow overwhelm in bringing about an emotional turmoil, Detachment seems to have calculated its ratio of pessimism and optimism very pedantically. Try to conjure up an extremely stereotypical image of Miserabilist "Exististentialism" in your head. Ultimately, We...  Are... All... Alone.... Falling..... Detachment resembles that mental image to quite a great extent.