A Hidden Gem

Last night, via streaming on Netflix, I watched a movie I had never heard of.  It was called Detachment, and it was directed by a British director named Tony Kaye—of whom I had also never heard, I am ashamed to say, since he is obviously a master. The movie probably ended up on my list because it starred the wonderful Adrien Brody, though it also had other celebrated names (Blythe Danner, Bryan Cranston, Marcia Gay Harden, James Caan) as well as talented newcomers (Sami Gayle, Betty Kaye, and a huge number of other student-age actors whose names went by too quickly for me to catch them).

Set in a disastrous New York City high school that is filled with disillusioned teachers and angry students, the movie has a semi-documentary feel to it, complete with intermittent “interviews” with the Adrien Brody character, Henry Barthes. Its plot is a downward spiral of loss and depression; besides the high school, the settings include the geriatric ward of a poor hospital, Barthes’s barely furnished studio apartment, and some nearly deserted city streets and buses, mainly at night.

Barthes himself is a “long-term” substitute teacher, meaning he comes into the high school for a month to hold down the classroom until a permanent teacher has been hired.  He is a capable teacher, if an unusually sorrowful one, but what he teaches the students is only occasionally literature and grammar and writing, the ostensible subject of the class.  Most of the time, he is just trying to hold together their lives by helping them to act more decently toward each other and toward themselves.

This is not an inspirational story. Barthes mainly fails with his classroom, just as he mainly fails to save his grandfather, his mother, and all the other people who have veered close to him.  His nearest thing to a success is a brief period in which he cares for a young street prostitute who practically forces her way into his life.  Part of the success (and it is a very sad one, nearly the saddest thing in this wrenching movie) is that he eventually forces her out of it.

You will be asking yourself:  Why should I watch this downer?  No doubt many other people asked themselves the same thing, which is why this terrific movie, made in 2011, has remained completely obscure, whereas a false film about false people experiencing false tragedies, like Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, can fill the moviehouses.  But why do you read Dostoyevsky or Kafka?  Why do you go to late-period Michael Haneke or mid-period Ingmar Bergman films?   Why do you stand in front of Goya’s dark paintings or read Thom Gunn’s AIDS poems?  Because truth matters.  And truth is finally what we go to art to receive, even if it is painful.

Detachment has this, and it also has the other saving grace of good art, which is a mastery of form and craft (which in this case means not just the visual mastery of film, not just the artistic intelligence of brilliant performances, but also the literary craft of an excellent script, here credited to Carl Lund).  I don’t know how Kaye, an Englishman, can know so much about an inner-city American high school.  I don’t know how anyone who has not been a teacher can know this much about the terrors and heartbreaks of the classroom.  But I do not need to know how he managed to do it. I only need to know that he has created a true work of art.