“True Blood’s” Alexander Skarsgård is in three movies opening up within a few weeks of each other, demonstrating impressive range. In “Disconnect” he plays a young husband whose grief over the death of his baby has made him feel isolated and helpless. In “Earth” he plays the charismatic leader of an off-the-grid group of rebels against corporations that harm people or the environment and the executives who run them. And in “What Maisie Knew,” a contemporary update of a book by Henry James, he plays a bartender who unexpectedly finds himself the stepfather of the title character.
Skarsgård is the son of Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård (“Good Will Hunting”). His first US role was in “Zoolander.” He later appeared in “Generation Kill” and in Lady Gaga’s music video for “Paparazzi.” His next film is “Hidden,” with Alexandra Riseborough, who also appeared in “Disconnect.”
Rate R for sexual content, some graphic nudity, language, violence, and drug use, some involving teens
Profanity:
Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Drinking, drug use
Violence/ Scariness:
Tense emotional confrontations, some violence, gun
Diversity Issues:
Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:
April 19, 2013
Viewers will spend much of this movie mentally imploring the characters on screen not to do what it is all too disturbingly clear that they are ineluctably drawn to do. This is a very scary movie with three stories about the disastrous consequences of revealing too much online. And the scariest part is off-line. Far more devastating than the painful consequences of the bad choices they make is the reason they make them, the yearning for connection.
Grief over the death of a baby drives a couple apart and they separately seek online support to make them feel less helpless and isolated and are ensnared by an identity thief. A devoted but distracted father does not know that his shy, sensitive son is being catfished by a couple of classmates, much less that the boy . An ambitious television reporter wants to write a story about an underage online sex worker, and that means she must get him to trust her. In their own ways, each of them is seducing the other for professional reasons.
These fact-based stories could easily come across as cheesy Lifetime dramas, but documentary director Henry-Alex Rubin (“Murderball”) gives it an intimate, natural tone. Sensitive performances from the entire cast are absorbing, especially Jason Bateman in his first full-on dramatic role as the father of the boy who thinks he has an online girlfriend and that she has asked him to send her a nude photo and Frank Grillo as the single father of one of the boys whose prank turns tragic.
The weakest of the stories involves the grieving couple, who decide to take things into their own hands when identify theft drives them to the brink of financial ruin and the revelations of their online activities drive them to the brink of marital disaster. But even that storyline has some gripping moments as the experience shocks them into talking to each other with more singularity of purpose and honesty than they have shared in a long time. The journalist’s involvement with the underage online sex worker has some superficially sleazy moments, but Andrea Riseborough (Wallis Simpson in Madonna’s “W.E.”) is excellent in showing us the character’s struggle with ambition, compassion, professionalism, and vulnerability. “It’s my job!” various characters cry out at different moments in the movie. It is just a way of declaring how that makes them responsible, and how it defines them.
As we have had to develop a new term, catfishing, to describe online relationships based on fictional character attributes, and even an entire television series on the subject, we are only just beginning to understand the way our brains are constructed to fill in the missing elements of these connections with elements from our own subconscious, a sort of romantic Rorschach test. What draws us in to these stories is the recognition that we bring so much hope and need to these online connections. But what keeps us thinking afterward is its reminder that while the in-person, real-life connections are what scare us most, it is because that is what we long for so deeply.
Parents should know that this cautionary tale includes nudity, explicit sexual references, very strong language, drinking and drugs, and underage sex workers.
Family discussion: Does this movie make you think differently about your online presence? How should the rules be changed? Why was it easier for these people to open up online than in person?
Interview: Henry-Alex Rubin, Director of “Disconnect”
Posted on April 8, 2013 at 8:00 am
Henry-Alex Rubin, director of the new movie, “Disconnect,” and I were were talking about the movie when his phone beeped. He reached into his pocket to turn it off and we both laughed at the real-life example of the movie’s theme. “Disconnect” has three stories about the ways that technology has affected our ability to connect to each other, and our conversation was being interrupted by a signal that it was his turn in an online word game.
“It’s not a social networking thriller,” he told me. It is a drama about the ways in which we reach out to each other and how technology has changed that, for better and for worse. Rubin is the award-winning documentarian who made the terrific “Murderball,” about wheelchair athletes (watch for one of them in a brief appearance in “Disconnect” as a drug dealer). In his first feature film, written by Andrew Stern, a young couple grieving over a devastating loss is hit with identity theft, a lonely teenager is pranked by classmates into thinking he is corresponding with a girl, and a reporter doing an expose of teens who perform for webcams finds that her judgement and ethics can be compromised. Rubin emphasized that the technology leads to connection and support in some cases as well as inflicting damage in others.
He was brought to the project by the producers because they wanted the film to have a documentary feel. “I filmed it like a documentary,” Rubin said. Instead of cameras and microphones intruding on the space around the actors, he used long lenses and pin microphones to keep the crew farther away and promote a more natural, intimate atmosphere for the actors. “And there were no mistakes,” he said. Particularly with the younger actors, he encouraged them to try whatever was comfortable for them by telling them that whatever they did was fine. “We kept rolling. If I had a note, I would not say ‘Cut.’ I would just tell them to go again and we would keep going.” For the older actors, like Jason Bateman, “who’s been surrounded by cameras since he was a kid and is completely comfortable,” it was less important.
But the film presented Batemen with a new challenge as well. “This was his first ever full-on dramatic role,” said Rubin. He plays the devoted but distracted father of the boy who is devastated by an online Catfish prank. “I had him grow a beard, so he would look a little different, to help separate him from what the audience would expect.”
Rubin did something different with Paula Patten, too, who plays a grieving mother drawn to an online support group. “It’s hard to make a woman as beautiful as she is look like a real person,” he said. He encouraged her to work without make-up and leave her hair messy. Her husband was played by Alexander Skarsgård, who also got a bit scruffy for the part, “with bags under his eyes and even put on a little paunch.”
Some things never change. People want to feel understood and important to one another, and that can be difficult. But it feels like technology has ramped up the stakes and we are still struggling to understand it. “There’s a line in the film that I got from Frank Grillo,” he told me. Grillo plays the single father of one of the kids who play the prank. Even though his character is an expert in computer safety, he does not know what his son is doing. “He says, ‘Computer time is up.’ He told me that’s what he says to his kids, so we put it in. ” That line is a reminder that no one knows what the rules are with technology that brings us together and keeps us apart.
