Short Term 12
A residential center for troubled teens provides the setting for Destin Crettin’s drama Short Term 12 that could provide the breakout role for a number of talented actors who (I hope) will soon be famous.
The road travelled to the making of this film was a long and winding one. When Crettin couldn’t find work after his college graduation, he took a “temporary” job at a group home for at-risk teens. He ended up staying with the job for two years, went to film school, and turned his experiences into a 20-minute short film for his thesis project. Entered into the Sundance Film Festival, the short earned the Jury Prize and sparked the creation of this feature-length script.
During the transition to a feature, the male lead in the short became a female named Grace (Brie Olsen)—one with a troubled personal history that allows almost instant rapport with her teenaged clients but creates obstacles to intimacy between herself and her coworker Mason (John Gallagher Jr.) with whom she shares a house and bed.
We meet these two staff members as they are introducing the newly hired Nate (Remi Malek) to his duties when a shirtless youngster named Sammy (Alex Calloway) starts running across the lawn towards the gate and freedom—freedom in the sense that once one of the teens leaves the grounds, the staff can’t interfere with whatever they decide to do (unless they pose a direct threat to themselves or others). We have already learned that during the night shift, a staff member is stationed inside the exit gate to strike up a conversation with any teen trying to leave—and to convince them they should stay until they are able to cope in the outside world.
Marcus (Keith Stanfield) is a bright young man who will soon turn 18 and automatically “age out.” Raised by a drug-addicted, prostitute mother, he doesn’t want to leave the security of the center and tries various ploys to avoid being sent out to survive in the outside world. His talisman is a Siamese fighting fish in a bowl, and, as the oldest and most experienced teen in the group, he helps the other, younger residents.
The newest arrival is a tuned-out, self-cutting girl named Jayden (Kaitlin Dever). She is a special case—one referred by a close friend of the center’s director, Jack (Frantz Turner), and she will only stay at the center on weekdays. Weekends she is to spend with her father, except when Friday afternoon arrives, the father doesn’t. Jayden reacts by running away from the center, and when Grace runs after the girl she is told “You can’t touch me or make me stop,” so Grace simply tails along on long walks and bus rides all the way to Jayden’s father’s dark and empty house.
The film manages to deal with deadly serious issues in a remarkably fresh and often quite entertaining manner. Crettin’s personal experiences as a staff member working with at-risk teens adds a fresh-faced reality to how the system works. It also reveals the tremendous skills, empathy and belief in helping others the paraprofessionals working with at-risk populations bring to their job.
This is an exceptional, highly emotional film with everything adding a tangible “realness” to the people onscreen. The characters become people we care about; and as we learn more about their histories, we come to understand their challenges, demons and opportunities. We do this in numerous ways—the loving anniversary party thrown for Mason’s foster parents, the bicycle ride for retribution Grace takes in the dark of night, the illustrated children’s story Jayden creates about an octopus befriended by a hungry shark, and the raw honesty in the personal rap song Marcus performs as Mason accompanies him on the bongos. That rap-song scene is so astounding, it’s worth the price of admission all by itself.
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