MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Trust’: Love Among the Disaffected

The Long Island in Hal Hartley’s “Trust” (selected theaters) is a bleak, grayed-out landscape peopled by blank, enraged oddballs. Hartley has such a spare, controlled touch in this film that this landscape seems both realistic and fantastic.

He expresses a recognizably modern suburban Angst and yet everything he shows us is out of kilter and personalized. It’s a documentary of the Long Island landscape as the director’s mindscape. Hartley uses the locale’s dead zone quality for deadpan humor.

Despite the film’s outre trappings, it’s surprisingly conventional in structure. It’s like a dour, crackbrained version of those ‘50s movies about misunderstood youth in rebellion against their uncaring parents. What saves it from sentimentality is Hartley’s tart, absurdist tone: He doesn’t give in to bathos.

Matthew (Martin Donovan), a gruff, disconsolate electronics whiz, lives with his widowed, burly neat-freak father Jim (John MacKay) in miserable disharmony. Maria (Adrienne Shelly) is a pregnant teen-age bimbette on the run from her abusive mother Peg (Merritt Nelson). (The mother accuses her daughter of giving her father a fatal heart attack.)

Matthew and Maria may at first seem like temperamental opposites but, when their paths cross, their attraction has a cockeyed inevitability. Jim and Peg have engendered a similar misery in their respective offspring.

Matthew and Maria are both primed to flee their parents, but they still crave a family. In the course of the film, they give each other what they both need.

Matthew, who is too surly and undomesticated to hold down a job for very long, calms down with Maria; in return, he brings out in her a principled delicacy. The actors have keyed into Hartley’s visual style with a vengeance; they hold themselves in rapt, studied poses that complement the studied geometry of his imagery. And they speak in a kind of cadenced, deliberate monotone that fits in with the visual design too.

All this may make the film sound draggier and less loopy than it is. The stylization takes some getting used to (particularly if you’re unfamiliar with Hartley’s first feature, 1990’s “The Unbelievable Truth”) but “Trust” (rated R for strong language) has the great advantage these days of at least having a style; most movies today look like they were directed either by a traffic cop or RoboCop.

You can pick out Hartley’s influences, primarily Jean-Luc Godard and the American independent filmmaker Mark Rappoport, but he’s his own man. The Long Island suburbia in “Trust” is as distinctively his as the suburban tracts in movies by Steven Spielberg or David Lynch.

The humor in “Trust” comes out of the situations and the design. The dialogue has a wobbly weirdness but it’s not, strictly speaking, funny. If you don’t go all the way with Hartley’s deadpan stylistics, it’s likely the film will pass right by you. There’s not enough human weight or emotional intricacy in what he’s doing to sustain you past the long pauses and the nothingness.

But Hartley is on to something here: He’s made a comedy for the new, white, suburban blitzed-out generation of smart, disaffected youth who are rummaging through their own nothingness in search of at least a personal style to get them through the day. For such a generation, “Trust” will probably play like a hip survival guide.

‘Trust’

Adrienne Shelly: Maria Coughlin

Martin Donovan: Matthew Slaughter

Edie Falco: Peg Coughlin

John MacKay: Jim Slaughter

A Fine Line Features release. Director Hal Hartley. Producer Bruce Weiss. Executive producer Jerome Brownstein. Screenplay Hal Hartley. Cinematographer Mike Spiller. Editor Nick Gomez. Costumes Claudia Brown. Music Phil Reed. Production design Daniel Ouellette. Art director Julie Fabian. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (strong language).