“Disconnect”: Movie Sounds The Alarm About Our Lives
by Arianna Huffington
The film, written by Andrew Stern and directed by Henry-Alex Rubin, is called Disconnect, and when it opens on April 12 I urge everybody to go see it. I found Disconnect incredibly compelling — a perfect use of storytelling to vividly dramatize an issue that permeates our lives to such an extent that it’s hard to even see. As well as Frank Grillo and Marc Jacobs, the cast includes Jason Bateman, Hope Davis, Paula Patton, Alexander SkarsgÃ¥rd, and Michael Nyqvist.
Disconnect — I’ll try to avoid spoilers — interweaves three stories, each involving characters whose lives have reached a crisis exacerbated by their dependence on technology at the expense of real human connection. There’s a couple that has recently lost a baby. Instead of grieving together, they turn away from each other, and lose themselves in online distractions. There are two boys who use the power of social media to take advantage of another boy’s loneliness and isolation — itself partly caused by his father’s obsession with work and email. And there’s a woman reporter who becomes involved with a 18-year-old webcam porn performer who lives in a house run by a porn kingpin played by Jacobs. Now do you want to see it?
The stories become more and more enmeshed and finally come together in a gripping ending. In each instance, it takes a crisis to shake the characters up. Disconnect shows how easy it is to allow technology to lure us into a somnambulist life, gradually being pulled away from a sense of who we are and what really matters. At one point, the father, played by Jason Bateman, huddles with his wife, played by Hope Davis, and his daughter, played by Hayley Ramm, and looks at his son, played by Jonah Bobo, and says, “Everything I love is in this room.” And yet that’s certainly not how he had been living.
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