Adrien Brody with his sensitivity and tortured face is just the right person for the role. No wonder the poster is a portrait of his twisted face stamped by the capital letter" DETACHMENT"
For a long time I have been pondering on the meaning of "Detachment": A substitute teacher who jumps from school to school, fearing of forming any long term relationship? A fat girl with a blaming father who seeks solace in her little attire flooded by her own sad photograph works and finally detached from the cold, sickening world by suicide? Everyone is deliberately detached from the surroundings but desperately in need of reunion, or to borrow a term from famous psychologist Fromm: the overcome of separateness.
At the beginning the movie seems to follow the traditional line of a loving and sophisticatedly skilled teacher who lands among a group of otherwise hopeless children and rescued them out of the mire. Yet the development probes it wrong, and the movie gained more depth by discussing "a state of being". A teacher in front of a class is not only facing a bunch of white,innocent and ready-to-be-written-on papers, but rather, the whole society and all the struggles and trauma that are stamped into them. A question follows: how can we save a kid today, and perhaps more importantly, ourselves?
The movie answers the question, or at least it seems to me, by an hug. Henry had pushed Erica to social workers to terminate this "temporary thing" but realized, after the death of Meredith, adriftness and detachment can only be save by attachment, by love, by completely giving oneself, by the courageous move of forming "eternal thing", to "become a part of a beautiful new world".
Words to be remembered:
1 Our young men, today — they being told that women are whores, bitches, things to be secluded, beaten, shit on, ashamed. This is a marketing holocaust, 24 hours a day, for the rest of our lives. The power that be, a harder work, dumbing us to death. So, to defend ourselves, and fighting against the stimulating of this dumbs into our thought processors, we must learn to read, to stimulate our imagination, to cultivate our own consciousness, our own belief systems. We all need these skills to defend, to preserve our minds.
2 During the whole of a dull,dark soundless day,in the autumn of that year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in heaven I had been passing alone on horse's back through the Singularly,dreary tract of the country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on within view of melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was But with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit I looked upon the scene before me, the simple landscape features of the domain Upon the bleak walls,upon the white trunks of decayed trees With the utter depression souls There was an iciness A sinking. A sickening of the heart
3 it is so easy to be careless. it takes course and courage to take cares.
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