{"id":210,"date":"2013-08-20T09:45:49","date_gmt":"2013-08-20T16:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=210"},"modified":"2013-08-20T09:47:23","modified_gmt":"2013-08-20T16:47:23","slug":"a-hidden-gem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/a-hidden-gem\/","title":{"rendered":"A Hidden Gem"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night, via streaming on Netflix, I watched a movie I had never heard of. \u00a0It was called\u00a0Detachment<\/a>, <\/em>and it was directed by a British director named Tony Kaye\u2014of 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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0He 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. \u00a0Most 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0His 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. \u00a0Part 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.<\/p>\n

You will be asking yourself: \u00a0Why should I watch this downer? \u00a0No 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<\/em>, can fill the moviehouses. \u00a0But why do you read Dostoyevsky or Kafka? \u00a0Why do you go to late-period Michael Haneke or mid-period Ingmar Bergman films? \u00a0 Why do you stand in front of Goya’s dark paintings or read Thom Gunn’s AIDS poems? \u00a0Because truth matters. \u00a0And truth is finally what we go to art to receive, even if it is painful.<\/p>\n

Detachment<\/em> 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). \u00a0I don’t know how Kaye, an Englishman, can know so much about an inner-city American high school. \u00a0I don’t know how anyone who has not been a teacher can know this much about the terrors and heartbreaks of the classroom. \u00a0But 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night, via streaming on Netflix, I watched a movie I had never heard of. \u00a0It was called\u00a0Detachment, and it was directed by a British director named Tony Kaye\u2014of whom I had also never heard, I am ashamed to say, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[123,122,124],"class_list":["post-210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-adrien-brody","tag-detachment","tag-tony-kaye"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":212,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions\/212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}