Detachment

    Detachment
    2011

    Synopsis

    A chronicle of three weeks in the lives of several high school teachers, administrators and students through the eyes of substitute teacher, Henry Barthes. Henry roams from school to school, imparting modes of knowledge, but never staying long enough to form any semblance of sentient attachment.

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    Cast

    • Adrien BrodyHenry Barthes
    • Sami GayleErica
    • Christina HendricksMs. Sarah Madison
    • Louis ZorichGrampa
    • Betty KayeMeredith
    • James CaanMr. Charles Seaboldt
    • Lucy LiuDr. Parker
    • Marcia Gay HardenPrincipal Carol Dearden
    • Blythe DannerMs. Perkins
    • Tim Blake NelsonMr. Wiatt

    Recommendations

    • 80

      The New Yorker

      It is the greatest biblio-climax of any film since "Fahrenheit 451," although Truffaut's prayer was that reading might yet survive calamity and carry the torch of the civilized. Detachment snufffs out that faith; books it warns us, are the first thing to go. [19 March 2012, p.91]
    • 75

      Entertainment Weekly

      When it stays in the classroom, Detachment is a scrappy testament - to the futility of even trying to reach students who are cut off from the possibilities of knowledge, and to the way that our teachers are slowly being driven nuts.
    • 70

      Salon

      People will either love Detachment or hate it, and either way it provides powerful testimony to the unrivaled passion and undiminished craft of director Kaye, whose notoriety in the film industry is matched by his near-total invisibility to the general public.
    • 70

      The Hollywood Reporter

      Adrien Brody, delivering his finest performance since "The Pianist," plays the central role of the disaffected Henry Barthes.
    • 67

      The A.V. Club

      For all its untrammeled excesses - and Kaye has proved that he'd sooner torpedo his own career than accept a little constructive trammeling - Detachment is almost forcibly moving, body-slamming its audience into submission.
    • 40

      Variety

      Scripter Lund, himself an ex-teacher, delivers a story that lacks nuance, and mixes badly with Kaye's impatient edits, Dutch angles and extreme close-ups.
    • 40

      Time Out

      The movie is one big scream, clichéd and hardly credible as an oblique call to civility.
    • 30

      Village Voice

      Movies about teachers are flypaper for overblown armchair crusaderism, and this overbearingly cynical attempt gets my vote for worst offender yet.

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