Home Performing Arts Best of Tribeca: The Heartbreaking Rise of the House of Kaye

Best of Tribeca: The Heartbreaking Rise of the House of Kaye

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Henry’s plan unravels hard in the course of those few weeks.  Perhaps the only reason Henry had opted for detachment to begin with was because he is anything but: he is a breathing, walking, feeling machine. Perhaps the very many visages he has seen desolation wear made him more acutely aware of the universality of human suffering. Perhaps his secret is tucked away in the murky folds of an untold family history. Or perhaps he was just born this way, like the rest of us. But his curse and ours is in having to feel and experience every last drop of human frailty down to the very bone. Each breath a kaleidoscope of pain, ricocheting on an ever growing cast of characters. Henry, Brody and Tony know pain is our brotherhood, they know to ignore the particulars of every situation as, from the inside, it is all the same: broken, hurt and angry souls, crushed by the pressure, barely reaching out for air from under “an ocean of pain.”

But don’t go assuming Detachment is a sort of bleeding melodrama holding a loaded gun to your heart. Profoundly cinematic, the film rides half-a-dozen different waves and never gets submerged. A truly phenomenal cast paints often extreme characters making a point to jar our expectations, but never veering far off the experiential ground we share. Caught in the political loopholes of a sacrificed educational system, Marcia Gay Harden, as hard-as-nails Principal Dearden, whispers in the PA system microphone curled up on her office carpet. James Caan, in a milestone performance, kicks the teens’ gangsta rhetoric far into next week (it could be said of James Caan’s career that it resembled a solid battalion of very impressive B1 Bombers. Here, in a handful of collectible scenes, he takes off like a rocket and leaves us on the launching pad, stunned). Lucy Liu is almost unrecognizable as a bruised, nervously spent guidance counselor. Christina Hendricks lends her fragile yet determined countenance to a most self-righteous and idealistic history teacher.

But at the heart of Henry’s re-sensitization journey are the semi-precious weapons of newcomers Betty Kaye and Sami Gayle, painting the two memorable sides of despaired teenage girlhood’s delicate coin. Erica is the hardened, street-wise, carefree girl-toy that buries her loneliness in haphazard prostitution. Meredith is the wounded, introverted and luminary artist trapped inside the form that will attract the world’s worst cruelties. Together they tug at Henry’s heartstrings in the sometimes cunning, sometimes drastic ways that abandoned youth will swallow its pride to finally demand care. Through them, he will learn to shed the cynical presumption that human suffering at large can’t be helped. And once the armor thins and finally shatters, he will rise to honor his own personal powers. 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.

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