The 2005 documentary Murderball, about the US men's basketball team in the Paralympic Games, is one of my favorite documentaries, if not films. Therefore I was eager to go to a screening of director Henry Alex Rubin's first "fiction" film, Disconnect, opening in theaters this Friday, April 12.Disconnect is an ensemble film focusing on several characters in different stories whose lives intersect, albeit briefly. Sound like a certain Oscar-winning film? The comparisons to 2005's Crash are warranted. It follows almost the same buildup, but instead of race, the focus is the internet and technology.
Two boys harass the school's loser by creating a fake Facebook profile and posing as a potential online bully; a grieving couple are coping with the loss of their infant son while trying to find justice on the man who stole from them using identity theft; an opportunistic journalist exploits her relationship with a teen sex worker to get a story on a teen runaway prostitution ring who perform "personal webcam" services. (The pimp and ringleader, is oddly played by fashion designer Marc Jacobs because... why not?)
Here's the thing about ensemble/anthology films: we spend less time with each character overall, so the writer has the challenge of making us care about each set of characters with less time. Therefore, each story escalates rather quickly, and in a predictable way. (I'll bet you can guess what happens to the kid that was bullied.) They all must lead up to some sort of climactic ending that will bring the stories to a closure, and teach the viewers the lesson learned. But therein lies the contradiction: I believe this film's intention is to warn us that the dangers of technology/social media can end in severed relationships. However, in the film, the aspects of technology only are connected by being present in the narrative, but don't actual cause the characters to act the way they act. This is one of my biggest pet peeves about criticism of social media: it doesn't directly cause the breakdown of communication, it's the way people choose to use it. It's not automatically bad.
