Trust is a great film, I had to see someone else praising it to remember. Adrienne Shelley was such a wonderful actress who a lot of people wouldn’t know if you mentioned her. I was so geared up with Where to Land featuring the girl I still follow on Instagram. I think the end result will be amazing, it’s just weird thing there’s another universe where this girl wound up in an indie movie.
I don’t know why Trust failed to win me over, it’s got so much going on. The casting’s off in terms of age, I don’t really see Martin Donovan’s character as particularly young, Shelley’s got that young ingenue look that can pass as teenage. I can’t tell how old Matthew’s supposed to be comparatively but he looks too old and his dad seems too young as well as Maria’s father.
Maria takes too much of the blame for her father’s death, she slaps the guy, he drops from a heart attack, it’s really a horrible coincidence. She’s forced to rapidly grow up and adapt to life immediately after being turfed. She finds someone possibly more worse off but still walks into danger anyway. A baby goes missing, she realises her boyfriend only saw her as a body, now everyone hates her. Matthew’s stuck living with his abusive dad and walks around with a grenade, a small allegory of his internal struggles, his always blowing up on people, one day he’ll pull the pin and all hell will break loose. He and Maria find solace in each other through their mutual displacement, societal rejects on the fringe. He hates repairing TVs, the new opiate of the masses, according to him, in a way he’s his own worst enemy but too much of an idealist to stop himself. He winds up between Maria’s sister Peg and Maria, who needs him more as a human shield against her crotchety bitch of a mother who basically wants her to suffer. She chooses to suffer, and she has a cute make-under when she puts her dorky thick framed glasses back on and finally appeals to Matthew, all the while trying to educate herself rather than remain ignorant as she was before. Maria’s mother decides to make his life more difficult along the way, so Peg’s on his back trying to get him into bed while poor Maria does penance. She takes a menial job, back then you could basically just walk into a factory and do whatever, it’s why Boomers don’t understand why we can’t get a job now. Maria also decides she has to find the father of the stolen baby, she’s doing a lot to make up for something that’s not really her responsibility, so her mother loves having her there as a maid. Peg’s also recently divorced and robbed of her kids. The mother tries to convince Matthew to date Peg, then cracks onto him herself. Matthew would rather Maria be treated kindly than suffer for her supposed sins. The mother doesn’t want to lose Maria she only hides it behind a need to control her because her own life is spiralling, but she’s also hiding Maria’s slap was perfect timing, she could get rid of her husband without a divorce.
The colours in this are a lot brighter than usual, I like Hal’s use of mostly natural tones, but Maria’s gaudy early 90s outfits, the fluorescent pink and orange highly contrasted against the greyness around her.
Hal’s kinda flew under the radar with the age gap relationships onscreen, he made these movies back when this was more common than people knew (but at least the actors themselves weren’t literal kids, you don’t see Henry with Susan until she’s well over 30). But Matthew’s obviously a grown man and I’d never get away with showing this to my friends any more than I did getting flack for lending my copy of Leon to them or when someone else watched Mysterious Skin with me. Yeah, I can’t share my movies with people and I don’t hate it, it’s another thing I get to like in peace. I put these on more to get off the internet, I thought we lost our connection this morning but it came back anyway.
Trust is fun, it’s got a cute anti-romantic ending. So I moved on to Simple Men, which I have a bigger fondness for. And you get a hot, young Holly Marie Combs before Charmed. And a cop has a fight with a nun. I like you don’t know if Bill’s actually conning Kate, I more found it weird the psycho ex-husband really wasn’t a threat, he looked like a bigger hopeless case than the guy who gave them the shoddy bike. The ex is more a shell of a guy who just wants a jacket, he looks pathetic but Kate fears him, he could easily snap and Bill’s not sure what to think. Everyone’s scared of the asshole until Kate shows up. She’s bolder than all the twits combined, Kate’s resilient and by the end she’s had it with men, clearly, she has to set them straight, Elena’s too innocent and has to run off with the father. Kate resolves things with Jack only to realise Bill’s a criminal too. And he needs her to lie to the cops, rightfully she won’t, she’s done. Bill finally takes it like a man and he ends up pitifully in love with Kate. There’s shades of Amateur in this, what truly makes a man a criminal, what makes him fundamentally dangerous or is he entirely desperate? Kate understands the law from having dealt with Jack, but she’s found someone she may be able to trust in Bill. His big plan to fuck over the next blonde woman he met falls down. He takes one more look at his deadbeat dad, mans up and goes back to Kate to turn himself in. We don’t see his arrest, just a final tender moment with Kate as the Sheriff says off screen, “Don’t move.”
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