Film / Reviews
Trash
Trash (15)
UK/Brazil 2014 114 mins Dir: Stephen Daldry Starring: Rooney Mara, Martin Sheen, Rickson Tevez, Eduardo Luis, Gabriel Weinstein, Wagner Moura
What’s that you say? The Brazilian Slumdog Millionaire from the director of Billy Elliot, written by the bloke who gave us Love, Actually? Kindly direct me to the nearest exit – pronto! To be fair, Trash isn’t quite as awful as one might anticipate, though the duo’s commitment to squeezing feelgood warm fuzzies from lives of favela poverty drives the plot towards an ending of quite staggering improbability.
We’re in a somewhat fluffier City of God neighbourhood, where grubby 14-year-old urchins Raphael (Tevez) and Gardo (Luis) are among the hordes who scratch a living picking through crap at the local tip. In the opening scene, we saw Elite Squad star Wagner Moura scarpering from the rozzers and ditching a wallet in the nearest garbage truck before receiving a severe beating. So it comes as no surprise that Raphael finds the wallet and pockets the modest amount of cash inside. But when the cops show up en masse at the tip to look for it, he figures that its other contents must be far more valuable. The entrepreneurial chums team up with a third lad, unpopular ‘sewer kid’ Rato (Weinstein), to decode a bunch of needlessly complex clues, finding themselves in mild peril as they uncover a web of civic corruption.
Martin Sheen and Rooney Mara pop up along the way as a saintly priest and a saintly NGO worker respectively, mainly, one suspects, to give the target mainstream audience a break from reading subtitles and to offer the film’s US distributor a selling point. The kids steal it with their sparky performances, though the script’s relentless feelgoodery never permits them to be down in the dumps, as it were, and you rarely feel as though they’re in any real danger. Trash is at its best when Daldry keeps things moving along at a brisk pace, especially during an exhilarating chase sequence. But everything grinds to a halt for clunky exposition. At one point, a security guard pauses to explain the plot for no apparent reason, and it’s never entirely clear why the kids become so bent on exposing malfeasance rather than simply trousering their spoils – except, that is, to facilitate a contrived upbeat ending that can best be described as rubbish.
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