Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.5

Trust Blu-ray Movie Review

. . .and disobey.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 19, 2013

One of the oddly comforting subtexts in Juno is how calm and supportive the titular heroine’s father and stepmother are when they find out their little girl is pregnant. It may not exactly be realistic,as those of you with increasingly sexually aware teenagers will agree. I’ve told both of my sons that if they ever get a girl pregnant, I’ll kill them, at which point the real punishments will kick in (and for you humor deprived who are currently looking up Child Protective Services’ number, that’s a joke—kind of.) But Juno serves as an example for all of us parents about how we’d like to think we’d respond under such stressful circumstances. A much more realistic depiction starts out Trust, a patently odd little indie film by Hal Hartley that attained some buzz on the festival circuit when it was released in 1990 and has gone on to minor if notable cult acclaim in the intervening years. Trust is not an easy film to love or in fact even to laugh at (despite the pull quotes on this Blu-ray insisting that it’s hilarious), for it brings together a bunch of misfit characters, most of whom are undergoing horrible tribulations, and then asks the audience to partake in a kind of collective schadenfreude in order to coax laughs out of what are on their face far from hilarious events. There’s a curious lack of point of view running through much of Trust, to the point where some audience members won’t know exactly what Hartley wants us to think about these various characters, something else that keeps at least some of the (in some cases literal) “punch” lines from landing. The film sometimes plays like the Bizarro world version of Juno, where a young high school girl named Maria (Adrienne Shelly) who in the film’s admittedly amusing opening scene keeps demanding five dollars from her less than cooperative parents and who then drops the little bombshell on them that she’s “with child”. After a dyspeptic showdown with her father, she storms out of the house, missing the intriguing development of Dad dropping dead from a sudden heart attack.

Playing out simultaneously to Maria’s “little problem” is the story of Matthew Slaughter (Martin Donovan), an emotionally roiled young man whose last name may in fact be frighteningly prescient of plans he is hatching due to an unfriendly work environment and an even more unfriendly home environment, where the hapless guy is regularly accosted (including physically) by his incredibly abusive father (John McKay). Matthew has just walked out on a quasi-high tech job (or at least what passed for high tech in 1990) where he tested computer monitors, monitors he has come to realize are pieces of junk not worth testing. When he attempts to “stick it to the man” in front of his aghast co-workers, he ends up assaulting his boss and sticking the poor guy’s head in a vise. So much for job security. When he gets home, however, he finds himself in a sort of really bad Twilight Zone episode where his father keeps insisting that Matthew clean the bathroom, even though Matthew has in fact cleaned it—several times, in fact.

It probably goes without saying that Maria and Matthew end up as twin misfits seeking refuge of sorts, if not necessarily in each other’s arms, at least in each other’s spirits. But the fact that each of these characters is so distraught in their own way, and in Matthew’s case especially, takes some of the wind out of the comedic sails. Sure it’s funny to laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel. But would you laugh if that person were handicapped in some way? Probably not, at least if there’s a shred of empathy in your worldview, and that’s where some of Trust becomes decidedly tricky to navigate. Adding to the general confusion of how we’re supposed to react to these characters is the fact that Maria seems at times genuinely nonplussed about her “condition”, albeit with some intermittent soul searching, and indeed almost becomes more overtly flirty if not exactly sexual, perhaps unconsciously, as the film progresses.

The film has an undeniably humorous streak, but it’s a nihilistic humor that finds “laughs” in such props as Matthew’s live hand grenade, which he carries around with him as a sort of postmodern security blanket. And there are fantastic little character beats scattered throughout the film, including from a virtually unrecognizable Edie Falco, dolled up (and brunette) as Maria’s sister. The film in fact works best in these smaller character moments rather than as an overall whole, where the deeply troubled characters never quite gel with what most audiences are going to find an acceptable baseline to easily laugh at. Add in a subplot about a stolen baby taken by an obviously disturbed woman and some more squeamish viewers may in fact be asking themselves, "I'm supposed to laugh at this?"

Hal Hartley generated some significant waves with the feature film that preceded Trust, the thematically quite similar The Unbelievable Truth (a film which also starred Adrienne Shelly as a kind of modern day coquette). Hartley has a fine, if highly skewed, comedic sensibility, but it sometimes verges on the masochistic, something that is almost painfully evident in some of the interactions in Trust. Wounded characters are often fertile ground for incisive comedy, but they also need to be written in a way where the audience isn’t spending so much time feeling sorry for them that they can’t laugh at them at the same time.

Note: I and at least one other member here who received an advance copy of Trust had some problems getting the disc to load. It ultimately does load, but there may be a lag of over a minute (with black screen) after you press "Play".

Trust Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Trust is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This film was shot on a virtually nonexistent budget, and all things considered, looks at least acceptable, though obviously not as glossy as higher budgeted fare. This high definition transfer has some odd color timing at times (notice the kind of weirdly pink flesh tones), but not having seen Trust theatrically, I can't offer an opinion as to whether it originally looked that way or not. There are some very minor contrast issues as well as some density fluctuations that at times cast a just slightly milky coating over some of the blacks. As is easily seen in many of the screenshots accompanying this review, Hartley and his DP Michael Spiller have a tendency to cast a lot of the film in a sort of blue-grey ambience that does tend to rob some of the image of fine detail in midrange shots. Close-ups continue to offer quite excellent fine detail, however, and the general look of this transfer is appealingly film like (as is almost always the case with Olive releases), as well as sharp and generally well defined.

Trust Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Trust features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track that serves perfectly well for this film's rather limited sonic ambitions. Virtually all of the film is comprised of dialogue moments, often between two characters, and as such the narrow soundfield doesn't really suffer very much and is able to deliver everything with very good fidelity and at times some surprising dynamic range. A couple of more aurally crowded scenes probably would have benefited from a surround offering, but as it stands this track does everything it's supposed to do without any problems, but similarly without much "wow" factor.

Trust Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Making of Trust (480p; 18:23) is an enjoyable little featurette that includes some interesting interviews with the cast and crew. Shelly reveals she was deathly ill during much of the shoot, having been misdiagnosed with Lyme Disease, but she feels that the pain she was going through informs a lot of her performance.

Trust Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Trust is a rather bizarre experience. The characters are fascinating, and some of the writing is very sharp, but there's also a kind of smarmy, unseemly aspect to being asked to laugh at such hapless folks. Helping to overcome this unsettling feeling is the uniformly good work of a very capable cast. Shelly and Donovan work extremely well together, and their fragile "love" affair (for want of a better term) is quite compelling. But Hartley might have done better to have backed off from some of the outright abusive elements in order to give the audience space to be able to find more humor in the unfolding events. Still, this is a decidedly quirky offering that should easily appeal to those who like their romances more than slightly skewed. This Blu-ray has very good video and audio, and the accompanying featurette, while brief, is quite enjoyable as well. Trust is not going to appeal to everyone, but for those whose sense of humor is appropriately jaded, this release comes Recommended.