Short Term 12 offers a disturbing sense of normality comprised of everyday conversation and emotionally-embattled teens in a foster-care facility. Moments after we are introduced to Grace (Brie Larson), Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), who are acclimating their summer volutenteer, Nate (Rami Malek), the perfunctory conversation of “normal” twentysomethings is shattered by a screaming twelve year old attempting to escape the facility in nothing but his underwear. This is part of the game. Every few weeks, he flees. Every few weeks, the staff corals him, calming his outburst with restraints and gentle voices.
From writer / director Destin Cretton, Short Term 12 avoids making a film centered on “crazy porn.” There are tropes here found in any other film involving adolescents from broken homes, but they don’t stifle the aim of the film, which is to illustrate, first, that “normal” is a construct hard to come by, and second, that compassion stems primarily from empathy.
As the film progresses, we begin to understand why Mason and Grace are so calm under fire, how they are able to communicate with adolescents whose occasional outbursts seem to random and unpredictable, how they can deal with this unpredictability day in and day out: they come from similar backgrounds. Their lives were far from perfect. Refreshingly, Short Term 12 doesn’t inundate the audience with flashbacks of abuse or provoke the characters to exposit the discomforting details of their childhoods. Rather, we infer what has happened from bits of verbal and bodily language.
In these vague and often silent moments, Short Term 12 is at its most realistic. Secrets aren’t as dangerous if they are out in the open, and the bottling up of memories and experience is what kindles the unpredictability and chaos in each character’s life.
In addition, this film doesn’t posit a hypothesis about how to make things better. It doesn’t encourage the audience to volunteer. Really, it suggests that issues don’t simply disappear, such is the case with Grace, whose past is most secreted. It impacts her relationship with Mason as well as their decision to move forward with Grace’s pregnancy.
We also see that there is a precarious line between those deemed normal and those seen as “underprivileged.” The latter is something exemplified most by Nate, the intern who, by his own admission, has always wanted to “help the underprivileged.” The problem is that his admission is to the group of youths within the foster care facility, something that immediately creates a class hierarchy. In truth, the character Nate is closer to the therapists seen briefly within the movie. They observe problems from a distance – Nate from his upbringing that separated him from those without a family and the therapists from within their offices, away from the everyday chaos that ensues.
As we’re told early on, staff like Mason and Grace are “not their parent, not their therapist,” they are there to maintain peace as best as they can. And maybe this is the perfect role for them because they can truly empathize and exude compassion.