Number 570 on the top 1000 films of all time is the 2011 drama 'Detachment.'
Henry Barthes (Adrien Brody) is an emotionally closed-off substitute teacher who drifts from job to job. But in his latest assignment to a failing inner-city school, he forges strong connections with three young women - fellow teacher Sarah (Christina Hendricks,) a sex worker Erica (Sami Gayle) and troubled student Meredith (Betty Kaye.) These personal relationships soon have him questioning his professional detachment.
There is no denying that there is an teaching crisis in the US. There is a shortage of 300,000 teachers with more an d more teachers leaving due to burn-out, massive class sizes and woefully inadequate funding. Covid brought a whole new set of challenges. And a lot of teachers feel unsupported by their superiors. Hell, some teachers are resorting to crowd-funding or paying for supplies out of their own pocket. It's just ridiculous.
I'm UK-based, but things are little better here. I have an SEN-teacher friend whose students come from broken families. Their parents are drunks and junkies who couldn't care less about their kids. I knew another teacher who taught over the pandemic and had virtual parents' evenings where the parents would turn up drunk or high. At school, I can attest we were little shits to our teachers with them storming out or having breakdowns on the regular. As an adult, I respect teachers so much. I could not do that job.
Detachment takes all of these issues and treats them with great sensitivity. We see everything through the eyes of substitute teacher Henry Barthes - he is a wounded man who is carrying around the trauma of seeing his mother's suicide as a child. He is also a lonely man with no family. Despite this, he refuses to give up on any of his students and encourages them all to achieve their potential. True none of them perform a full 180, but you can definitely a see a chance from the start to the end of the film.
A lot of that is down to Henry Barthes. You repeatedly tell a student he's always going to be a failure, he may start to believe you. But if you believe in them, they may believe in themselves. That's what the best teachers do. I very much enjoyed Brody as Barthes and Hendricks as Sarah. There is one particularly touching scene where she helps one struggling student with his maths work. He brought an authenticity to the character. Perhaps some of that is down to Carl Lund's script. He was a teacher so he was able to bring a lot of realism to the writing especially in how the teachers interacted and related to each other.
Many of the issues presented here seemed painfully realistic. From the unruly children to the parents blaming teachers for their children's failures - Sarah has one mother scream in her face after her daughter is expelled - to the government officials blaming the teachers for their under-achieving students. Isiah Witlock Jr had a small, but great role as government official Mr Mathis. He is there to help the school achieve its potential, but insults the teachers by implying their failings is making the whole area look bad. Very quickly the veneer slips and he quietly threatens the school principal. He reminded me of every pompous, holier-than-thou nit-picking jobsworth who only cares about money or reputation. He was thoroughly unlikeable, smarmy and malicious character.
Lucy Liu also had a small role, but she was also great as guidance counsellor Dr Parker who has a mental breakdown after trying her best to help her students, only to have them throw it back in her face.
My sister has been a teacher most of her life and she has said that teachers are expected to do so much more than the 9-5. They're expected to work in their free time and on weekends. But more than that, they're expected to be mentors and surrogate parents. That is very much what Henry Barthes is with the sex worker Erica and the troubled student Meredith. It is heavily implied that Erica is under-age and Henry takes her in and becomes a surrogate father to her. The two of them open up to each other, and with Henry's guidance, Erica starts to take more personal responsibility. Sami Gayle brought a lot of vulnerability to the role and this makes her ultimate fate all the more tragic. Feeling he is becoming too close, he calls social services to take Erica away.
But the true tragedy lies with Meredith whom Henry also becomes a surrogate father for. She is badly bullied by her classmates and has an abusive relationship with her father. Her only creative outlet is her photography which she uses to express her emotions. Henry and Meredith begin connecting more deeply until he realises that he may be crossing his own personal boundaries and he pushes her away. This ends horrifically with Meredith committing suicide. But this storyline highlights a conflict that most teachers go through. How do you stay professionally detached from somebody who is in your care? Especially somebody as young and as troubled as Meredith.
However, with so much going on in one film, it was unfortunate that some story-lines were short-changed. Henry and Sarah have a small romantic relationship, but this wasn't explored in enough detail to have truly been effective. I think this was a shame as Sarah's influence would have helped Henry reconnect with his emotions. Yet we didn't focus on this enough for it to have any major impact on his character. The film is just over an hour-and-a-half long, but I think an extra twenty or thirty minutes would have helped to round out this subplot.
But nevertheless, this was a great film that would have otherwise flown under my radar. And every respect to teachers. I tip my hat to you.
