MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Trust Me’: Sleazy Picture of Art World

The ubiquitous L.A. expression “Trust me” usually is a polite way of saying something like, “Listen, I outrank you, don’t bother me about details,” or sometimes just, “Shut up; I don’t want to explain myself.”

In “Trust Me” (AMC Century 14), a blank-walled, frilly comedy-romance set in the world of Los Angeles art galleries, it is co-writer-director Bobby Houston’s tag-line for his major villain, an amoral dealer named James Callendar, who gets his hooks into an idealistic young painter Sam Brown and tries to squeeze him dry.

Obviously, we can’t trust Callendar. Played by rocker Adam Ant, with the porcelain features of a Byronic hustler, he’d prefer to pitch dead painters because they’re more valuable and less troublesome; if they aren’t dead yet, he has a few plans for helping them along. Callendar is such a sleaze that his secretary sums up his sex life by cracking that he sleeps with people he met at the Ready-Teller. But can we trust the movie, either?

Sam Brown, played with flirty ingenuousness by David Packer--he seems a cross between Tom Hanks as a beach boy and a New Age Mr. Deeds--is someone’s over-rosy dream of an artist. He’s a rich boy with impossible parents and a history of nervous breakdowns--and there are forced jokes about his mother misperceiving him as gay. Real gays, like Callendar’s mincing gallery assistant (William DeAcutis), kid her along.

Houston lays on this dream thick as impasto. Sensitive, charming and a regular-guy baseball nut, Sam lives in a huge, sunny loft, where he hangs toy babies from ceiling wires and paints big copies of Caravaggio cherubim against wispy-clouded blue skies. Everyone seemingly wants to sleep with Sam or buy his pictures, yet he’s so indifferent that, when he winds up in bed with Callendar’s secretary (Talia Balsam, who uses some winning understatement), it’s not supposed to be opportunism but true love.

This delivery-boy artist is also so divorced from notions of commerce that the corrupt dealer has to steal his work in order to show it. Yet he’s so talented that, when the N.Y. Times art critic catches a glimpse of his work, it becomes the rage of L.A. He’s also a painter nobody understands: Callendar accidentally hangs the cherubs wrong-way-up and they’re mistaken for symbols of the Angst and tragedy of life.

Actually, Callendar’s mistake is apropos. These paintings do look better--at least more original--upside-down. And the comedy has a schizo-trendy ring. Just like the world Houston and his co-scenarist Gary Rigdon satirize, the movie glides along on surfaces, envelops itself in a creamy patina of ersatz taste and wallows in the same superficiality it’s sending up. The dealers are vampires, the critics are dopes, the buyers are silly old women; no wonder they all go crazy for Caravaggio cherubs turning somersaults. And it’s probably not surprising that Callendar’s amorality is conveyed by showing him as a deadbeat, a crime of which starving, dedicated artists are often at least as guilty as their dealers.

For a low-budget movie, “Trust Me” is astonishingly good-looking. Houston has a decorator’s sense of space and light. As his camera floats slowly through the galleries, lofts and chi-chi houses, his images seems lacquered with sunlight, tremulous with laid-back Southern California chic. But there’s no verbal or comic style to match the visual flash. And there’s as much space around the jokes as there is around the furniture.

The movie (rated R for sex, nudity and language), is like a wasted, lazy day on La Brea or the old La Cienega: a round of sex, deals and gallery openings where lust perks behind badinage, and the wit is as barren as the art. Instead of the torrent of satire that poured out of Joyce Cary’s “The Horse’s Mouth,” “Trust Me” gives us tricklets and driblets: bon mots as paltry as one grape lying on a nouveau cuisine salad plate. Houston shows lots of visual talent, but when his movie says “Trust Me,” don’t.