By: Paul Zecharia | www.stonesdetroit.com
We live in a world run by technology. We live in a world where anybody and everybody can be affected through electronic communications. What we get from Disconnect is not one, but three cautionary tales about how far the abuse of technology and social networking can go. It all goes through several points of not only emotional and physical damage, but also legal damage. In this film, people’s lives are ruined. The repercussions are devastating and it almost feels like none of them will ever lead to satisfactory results. And it is truly one of the year’s best films by far. Disconnect challenges its characters into dangerous situations while at the same time conveying a message of carefulness and how far you can go with abusing technology. With a strong cast and incredible direction from Henry-Alex Rubin, the awarding-winning director of Murderball, this film will surely make you feel both uncomfortable and invested at the same time. It also has a powerful screenplay from Andrew Stern, who has basically taken the film Crash and added elements of the Internet to it. For those who don’t know, one of my favorite genres of film is one I call the “Intertwining Stories” genre, and Disconnecthas all the tricks and moves to make it a great entry in this group.
Disconnect asks a major question: “Whatever happened to social interaction?” Much of the characters in this film are grounded to their laptops, cell phones, iPads, you name it. The rules and ways of society are changing. However, it does not reach a point where we should blame technology for all our problems. It’s the choices that these characters make and what they do that ultimately bring them to their downfalls. Also, these stories and situations are all connected in some way without any confusion. They are not all entirely related to each other, but it is worth noticing how they can all be affecting. A lot of these characters do not come face-to-face until much later in the film, because most of their introductions deal with their communications through their electronic devices. They sometimes feel comfort with these people while also being intrigued by who and what they have to say to each other. The film also uses a clever trick by having what the characters are typing to each other show up onscreen. Obviously this happens more than once in the film, and there’s little to no dialogue when it happens. Much of the emotions of the characters are shown visually instead of verbally. Mad props to this technique.
So we got three stories. The first one involves a loner teenage musician named Ben (Jonah Bobo), who strikes up a Facebook conversation with a girl he believes goes to his school. But it’s actually a fake profile created by two of his classmates: Jason (Colin Ford) and Frye (Avaid Bernstein). They pretend to have warm and flirtatious chats with Ben, but it all goes too far when they encourage him to send a nude picture of himself. And he actually does. This causes Jason and Frye to send the picture to the entire school, which leads to Ben being the subject of embarrassment. Now we have the rest of his family reacting to this debacle. They consist of the father Rich (Jason Bateman), the mother Lydia (Hope Davis), and the eldest daughter Abby (Haley Ramm). While Lydia and Abby tend to the needs of Ben, Rich spends a lot of time online trying to figure out what could have lead to his son’s demise, considering how they have been disconnected for a while.
The second story focuses on Derek Hull (Alexander Skarsgård) and his wife Cindy (Paula Patton), who had recently lost their infant child and are struggling to move on. Derek is an ex-Marine who has a hard time connecting with his wife, so he turns to online gambling as an escape. Cindy, however, turns to online chat rooms, specifically one that deals with those coping with grief. She begins a friendship with an online user who goes by the screen name “fearandloathing”. Suddenly, the couple becomes victims of identity theft and their entire life savings are gone. They hire a cyber detective named Mike Dixon (Frank Grillo) to solve the case. Dixon also happens to be the widowed father of Jason, one of the bullies, whom he also feels distant from. He eventually learns that the perpetrator is a man named Stephen Schumacher (Michael Nyqvist), but still cannot find suitable proof to take him in. Derek decides to take matters into his own hands and track down Schumacher. Cindy also summons up the courage to help him, but not everything goes according to plan.
The final story deals with a young, ambitious and attractive television reporter named Nina Dunham (Andrea Riseborough), who launches a personal investigation into the world of online chat sites involving underage sex workers. She comes across one boy in particular named Kyle (Max Thieriot), who lives in a house inhabited by runaway street kids who now perform sexual acts online. And they’re under control by their boss Harvey (Marc Jacobs, the fashion designer). Nina and Kyle’s first video chat baffles him when she tells him that she would rather talk and ask him questions rather than her asking him to perform sexual acts. Nina is heavily interested in doing a story about Kyle and the website he works for. He eventually agrees by doing an on-camera interview in which he is kept in shadow and his voice is altered to hide his identity. However, this attracts the attention of the FBI and they threaten Nina’s career as well as the livelihood and safety of Kyle. Her lawyer happens to be Rich, from the first story. She now must question her ethics as a reporter as well as her growing relationship with Kyle.
The stories are not all equally strong or matching with dramatic tone, but the stakes are high for each character. Although Bateman’s character is representing Nina, he’s only in one scene in which he tells her what could potentially happen with her career. We mostly see Rich as the neglectful and busy father, spending most of the time on his phone and not enough time with his son. But once the family is sucked into Ben’s conflict, Rich now realizes he has to take more action. This leads to quite possibly the strongest performance of Jason Bateman’s career. People would normally associate him with playing the straight guy providing a lot of deadpan humor in every comedy he’s been in, but he reaches an incredibly heart-wrenching performance which nearly brought me to tears. Riseborough as Nina the reporter is also incredibly strong, charismatic, and delightful. She has that ability to show dedication to her role as a reporter, but also show her reluctance and indecisiveness when it comes to Kyle. And speaking of Kyle, Thieriot is also great and effective. Bobo and Ford are also tremendous in their roles of the shy teenage prey and the online predator who does absorb the repercussions of cyber-bulling, respectively. We also see both sides of Grillo as the cyber detective/father. He does his best at his job, but also tries desperately to be a good father, due to the death of his wife. Skarsgårdand Patton have great chemistry. The aftermath of their sudden loss and the pain they go through as victims of fraud seem very real and emotional. It’s almost heartbreaking to see them trying to reconnect as a couple while deciding to take action against their online predator. Every actor in this film is just great.
Disconnect is absolutely splendid. It knows the message it wants to get across and it does it without trying to be preachy, which is a quality that I cannot stand in a film. However, one particular line does manage to squeeze itself in: “You wanna f*** with somebody, you do it to their face!” Even though it’s an obvious line, I’ll give it credit for being poignant. Much like Traffic, Babel, and Crash (which is one of my all-time favorite films), Disconnect is all about human connections and the impacts they could have on each other. The film can be hard to watch at times, but it goes in directions where it will never fail in keeping you heavily invested. You do get interested in what the characters are going through because in today’s society, it’s not impossible to get involved with some kind of online entanglement. Cyber-bulling and online crimes are a huge deal nowadays, and this film addresses these issues with its upmost dignity and sophistication. It will raise questions about personal responsibility and it could even scare into wanting to take more action when it comes to the Internet. Nobody has all the answers, but it does leave it open for interpretation. It’s not necessarily portraying the Internet as the villain, but it warns you of the choices you make and what you will end up regretting. Don’t worry; Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging are not our enemies. Everybody’s a victim and everybody’s a predator. And Disconnect is here to remind us that you never know what could happen online.
Five out of five stars.
Disconnect is rated R for sexual content, some graphic nudity, language, violence and drug use – some involving teens.
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