Once you’ve finished watching Stephen Daldry’s new film Trash, it’s hard to resist the word play and not say that it is, indeed, a piece of cinematic trash — and by trash, I don’t mean the countercultural subgenre you can associate with, say, John Waters. Even if well intended — at best, which I seriously doubt — and just like his previous outing Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Trash is presented as a socially conscious and morally uplifting feature where good prevails over evil in a very, very contrived way. In fact, you may take the whole story as some kind of uplifting fable — with poor kids in favelas and garbage dumps instead of talking animals. But even if that’s the case, it’s a pretty lousy fable.
Adapted from Andy Mulligan’s novel of the same name, Trash is shot on locations in Brazil and tells the story of 14-year-old trash picker Raphael (Rickson Tev) and his chance discovery of a wallet that belongs to an unknown person named José Angelo (Wagner Moura). He and his friends Gador (Eduardo Luis) and Rato (Gabriel Weinstein) get involved in an investigation regarding the mysterious wallet, which leads them to corrupted politician Santos and equally corrupted policeman Frederico (Selton Mello). Needless to say, their lives are endangered, just like that of Father Julliard (Martin Sheen), a generous and tireless protector of the poor.
So expect teenagers deciphering complex secret codes, memorizing a long and discursive letter and then reciting it as to get across secret information, throwing bundles of money out in the open in garbage dumps so that other impoverished souls get a piece of the bad guys’ cake (who by the way are extremely vicious), a noble US religious man (sort of a modern missionary) who, no matter what, always does the right thing, and long action sequences and shootouts where bad cops chase the kids who manage to escape miraculously every single time — among other things. And, of course, the kids also do the right thing without expecting any kind of profit and just for the sake of justice. Yes, it’s all very unlikely, to say the least.
But what’s most annoying is that Daldry’s new feature tackles painfully complex issues in such a reductionist way and with such a disregard for reality that you cannot but feel you’re being taken for a numbskull. With a distorted eye that depicts Brazil as a most dangerous land inhabited by cartoonish figures posing as characters, this is exactly the kind of film bound to be delightful to the conscience of your average bourgeois viewer who believes in a black-and-white world where good does triumph over evil if there’s just enough will power and perseverance. Come to think of it, instead of a fable, Trash is an ill-fated fairy tale.
