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Monday, October 20, 2014

Trash first look review – Stephen Daldry forages into a favela mystery

Stunning performances from a trio of young Brazilian actors save Daldry’s compelling tale of corruption from a rubbish ending
4 out of 5
Stephen Daldry's Trash
Heaps of young acting talent … Stephen Daldry’s Trash. Photograph: Rome film festival
Last summer the world gathered in Rio for the World Cup in which the home team suffered a loss of historic proportions. In the lead-up to the games, demonstrators took to the streets to protest against misspent public funds allocated to the sporting event while 20% of Brazilians live in poverty. Numerous homegrown movies and documentaries have shed a spotlight on rampant corruption, injustice and police brutality, but Brazil is still a place of sunshine and carnival for many Europeans, though not Stephen Daldry, whose new film Trash, screening at the 2014 Rome international film festival and opening in the UK in January, is set in seedy favelas and landfills where pickers forage for a living.
One such forager is 14-year-old Raphael Fernandez (Rickson Tevez, in a stunning debut), who finds a wallet containing a wad of cash, a flip-book photo of a little girl and the key to a train-station locker. Along with his best friend Gardo and a pariah called Rato, who lives in a sewer, they hide their find from a corrupt police inspector who appears ready to move heaven and Earth to recover it. Key to solving the mystery is a list of numbers scrawled on the back of a photograph and a Bible in the hands of a prison inmate whose murdered son was an adviser to a corrupt mayoral candidate. The race is on between the boys and the police to solve the riddle and recover a missing fortune along with a ledger containing a litany of corrupt officials. Assisting the boys are Martin Sheen as an American priest, and Rooney Mara as an aide worker, though both have limited purpose in the movie beyond making Trash a safer bet for investors and boosting market potential.
With Trash, Daldry does what he’s been doing since his breakthrough,Billy Elliot; he delivers a well-crafted, above-average film that aims high but invariably falls short. That movie’s greatest strength is Jamie Bell’s performance. He was just 14 at the time, as was Thomas Horn, who made his debut in Daldry’s 2011 movie, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Each features outstanding debuts by youngsters, demonstrating the one thing Daldry does better than any of his peers.
His new movie goes one step further in that his trio of young actors speak no English, nor had they training or acting aspirations when they signed on. With its heavy plotting, Trash hardly aspires to docudrama, yet the trio paint an indelible portrait of youth in crisis that is essential to the movie’s success.
Richard Curtis’s well-paced script based on Andy Mulligan’s novel is short on exposition at the onset, which keeps the audience guessing, but offers an unwieldy knot of information halfway through. As a mystery, Trash is compelling enough though its milieu and the outstanding performances at the centre of the movie are what set it apart, along with Elliot Graham’s kinetically edited chase sequences through a train station and later a favela.
The trash heap Raphael and his friends dig through was created by the production because real landfills contain a high level of toxic waste. Daldry has talked about how social-justice movies are often downers, which is why he ended Trash on an optimistic note that undermines otherwise strong thematic elements. It is at odds with the performances and feels as inorganic as Daldry’s ready-made trash heap, though not enough to sabotage an otherwise enjoyable effort.

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