Short Term 12

Like Fruitvale Station, another outstanding and sadly under-appreciated film from 2013, Destin Crettin's Short Term 12 is about the conditions of happiness. Grace (Brie Larson) works in a foster care facility for teenagers who struggle with all kinds of demons. As the audience is introduced to the place through the eyes of a new employee, who soon learns that he has to reconsider his notion that the children are there to teach him an important lesson about life and that he has to choose his words more carefully, it becomes clear that the reasons for her being there, and everybody else being there, goes far beyond holding down job. 

In the course of the film, the characters are constructed brilliantly, through small scenes that shed light on their past, but never fall into the trap of explaining or interpreting too much - Grace's fearless dedication and drive that sometimes goes beyond the limits the institutions set her, whenever she feels like they don't protect the children enough, is based in her own experiences as a child, but that connection is never reduced to a simple cause-result, an oversimplification of her internal and external scars. It's a struggle against her own history, by protecting someone else from experiencing the same kind of trauma - a new arrival, Jayden (played by Kaitlyn Dever, as outstanding here as she is on Justified), but at the same time fight against inaction and the kind of carelessness that allows for the most vulnerable to slip through the cracks. At home and with the possible future of building a family with her co-worker, she struggles with the fear of repeating patterns, and with the question of even the most loving, most caring environment is certain to prevent the kind of suffering that she experienced in her past, and sees every day. 

At the same time, and in its best moments, Short Term 12 is a film about characters who struggle to express themselves, who find solace and dignity in their ability to tell their own stories, without making them any less horrifying just to spare the audience. Like in Pariah - another beautiful but cutting treatise on the wounds that parents can leave carelessly and the fight to maintain a sense of self in defiance of them - the most important moments are the ones when the kids draw and write and sing against what happened to them. There are no easy victories and no real happy endings here, since both would be a lie.

2013, directed by Destin Cretton, starring Brie Larson, Kaitlyn Dever, John Gallagher Jr., Keith Stanfield, Stephanie Beatriz, Rami Malek, Alex Calloway, Kevin Hernandez, Lydia Du Veaux.