奧斯卡影帝安德林布洛迪在《人間師格》裡飾演一位充滿理想和同情，卻又因童年陰影而恐懼親密關係的代課老師，遊走於絕望的高中校園內，面對一個個問題重重的師生，充滿矛盾的性格逐步導向悲劇，布洛迪演來絲絲入扣，今晚再來回味一次令人動容的結尾。
「你走在走廊上，身在班上，有多少人感覺到身上的壓力？我有。大家都有。愛倫波在100多年前，就寫過這些事，我們看書時會發現，亞瑟公館不只是破敗的老宅，它也是一種存在狀態。『那年秋天暗沉無聲的一天，雲朵低掛在天空中，我獨自騎馬穿越一片抑鬱鄉間，最後，當夜幕降臨，我已置身悲涼的亞瑟公館，我不清楚它的過往，但看到這幢建築物的第一眼，難以忍受的陰霾襲上心頭，我抬頭仰望，單調的景象就嵌在血紅的牆上，映在白色腐朽的樹幹上，拖著極度沮喪的靈魂，我的心感到一陣冰冷，翻騰，作嘔…』—愛倫坡《亞瑟家的傾頹》」
A chronicle of three weeks in the lives of several high school teachers, administrators and students as seen through the eyes of a substitute teacher.
Detachment is a chronicle of three weeks in the lives of several high school teachers, administrators and students through the eyes of a substitute teacher named Henry Barthes. Henry roams from school to school, imparting modes of knowledge, but never staying long enough to form any semblance of sentient attachment. A perfect profession for one seeking to hide out in the open. One day Henry arrives at his next assignment. Upon his entry into this particular school, a secret world of emotion is awakened within him by three women. A girl named Meredith in his first period. A fellow teacher Ms. Madison, and a street hooker named Erica, whom Henry has personally granted brief shelter from the streets. Each one of these women, like Henry, are in a life and death struggle to find beauty in a seemingly vicious and loveless world.
You can do what you can to ease the pain, one human being at a time. And maybe you must, as there might be no other way to make it out of this world in one piece. This is how Detachment rises so far above the grim realities it endeavors to portray. If it throws some solid punches to disturb our own detachment, it does so with such acute compassion and cinematic elegance that consistently, it leaves us a flush with wonder at the sheer beauty of this finely wrought machinery we call human beings.
Detachment has renewed some of our faith in the purpose of such things as film festivals and is soon to join the ranks of American History X in the pantheon of the most potent, lasting and thought-provoking films of our time.
Adrien Brody is riveting as a seemingly serene but deeply damaged substitute teacher. His sloping eyebrows, sometimes treacly or overwrought in other performances, here convey an- inch-from-the-cliff hopelessness without ever becoming a mask. Mr. Brody's Henry Barthes is sweetly but searingly honest with his students even as sadly skulks among the halls of his school. Barthes is also furious-- enough to throw desks in his classroom and scream at a late night nurse at his grandfather's assisted care facility. In close-up, documentary-style interviews, Mr. Brody's eyes flash like lightning one moment and then become as dull as concrete the next, daring us to try to understand how one can care so much and so little. His Barthes has a teacher's countenance in this film, acutely aware of how important yet futile his work is. It's a career performance.
Barthes' determination to be disconnected keeps him the perennial substitute-- in the classroom and in his personal life. Barthes tends to his grandfather but has more than enough time to help out two young girls, a young prostitute and an overweight loner. Despite his earnest efforts, almost none of it works out well. The complicating plot lines, all involving family surrogacy around Barthes, serve the notion that teachers must be dispassionate and alone in order to perform their jobs. The story survives its few yet regrettable school clichés by sticking to this thesis.
As a public school teacher sitting in the audience at the world premiere last night in Tribeca, I have mixed feelings about telling you that Tony Kaye has masterfully succeeded in capturing public school in a macabre and beautiful chalkboard sketch. His lush, mannerist portrait brings a gorgeous but searing light to the lonely reality of the teaching profession. Mr. Kaye's "Detachment" presents school the way so many of us on the inside see it: a windswept wasteland scourged of its humanity by a culture that burdens its underfunded and unfairly censured teachers with rearing, policing, and institutionalizing our children.
I hate to say it: public school really is this bad. The few great teachers that our system manages to attract are barely hanging on from year to year, knocked senseless by a society that demands way too much from them.
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