Maria Coughlin (Adrienne Shelly) announces to her parents her plans to quit high school, pregnancy, and intention to marry her boyfriend Anthony. Her boyfriend refuses and her father drops dead soon from the shock. Her mother kicks her out of the house. She meets Matthew Slaughter (Martin Donovan) who takes her in. He's an electronics repairman who hates TV's cultural influence. He quits his job and fights with his father. He steals a hand grenade from his veteran father. Maria and Matthew start a relationship based on respect, admiration, and trust = love.Hal Hartley's mannered dialogue is similar to Wes Anderson but it doesn't have his later polish. This doesn't have quite the comedic tone needed. What it has is the magnetic Adrienne Shelly. She keeps this movie alive when it starts to sputter with its insistent style. There also has Edie Falco as the older sister. Hal Hartley definitely has a style and seems intent on using it no matter what.

Marketed with the promotional tagline "A slightly twisted comedy", that is not even the half of it as this Hal Hartley film focuses on an unconventional and entirely non-sexual romance that develops between a pregnant teenager and a social misfit twice her age. Both characters curiously defy the initial impressions that they give. As the teen, Adrienne Shelly seems bratty and brainless, wearing heavy makeup and disrespecting her parents, however, she gradually becomes more dowdy after her parents and her boyfriend both reject her upon learning about the pregnancy. As the social misfit, Martin Donovan (no, not the director of 'Apartment Zero'; another Martin Donovan) seems dangerous and prone to violent outbursts, but totally submissive when around his bathroom sanity obsessed father, Donovan also shows us a beating human heart beneath the anger. The film takes a bit too long to bring the two characters together (it is a full 26 minutes before their separate plots converge), but there is a lot to like in how they trust each other for different reasons; her for his sincerity and workplace integrity and him for her genuine warmth. Hartley unnecessarily complicates things with a stolen baby subplot that awkwardly pops up every now and again without offering any real perspective on how Shelley feels about her own baby to-be. In the scenes where Hartley just lets his characters interact with each other though, the film rarely skips a beat. Rebecca Nelson is also very good as the girl's mother who goes from resenting Donovan to trying to manipulate who he likes for her own advantage.

Most popular films delineate their stories in a rather comical and insipid way: the dialogue is often exchanged between characters as if it were bounced off a Spartan gladiator - and, in some cases very little to short-of-nothing is penetrable in the film."Trust" is a film that inverses that idea - and does so with wit, charm, and most importantly: astute cleverness. The story begins with careful sequencing that portrays each character a new journey of life. We see an antisocial protagonist, a pregnant girl who recently dropped out of high school, and a motherly type whose apathy is cunning and partially insane. "Trust" is a love story that defies any cliché of filmmaking. The lead character pours his organism into the film and invokes integrity of personality without apprehension or any constipation (who can forget that wit from Mr Slaughter??) The film is about what happens when we take chances, and don't take chances. In short: it's about being and what happens when we share our being with others.The film's sequencing is what I loved most of all. It's weaved into a fabric that reminded me of early avant-garde films (the envelope of the story is reminiscent of Kubricks's older film "The Killing") and perhaps more-or-less surprising is the protagonist(played by Martin Donovan) exchanges silence; those rare moments in the film that can't help to be compared to the work of Godard. Momentarily, it shines solicitude and violence (the symbolism is slightly ironic and very insincere.) My favorite moments are about jeering characters who feel unwanted.A definite must-watch. I recommend it to anyone, everyone.

Probably one of the least seen films that I have discussed over the last 6 months, this was a movie that I remember vividly as a teen, though in more glowing terms than I now see it.Trust was made by indie filmmaker Hal Hartley, who was renowned for his dialogue heavy films exploring regular people going about their lives. Now that I revisit this some 20 years later I think that perhaps his work also merits the dreaded "quirky" tag.The film starts with a domestic between a young girl and her Dad, the scene culminates with the Dad keeling over dead of a heart attack.The girl is one of two leads, her name is Maria, she is apparently high school age, is pregnant to the quarterback who she now wants nothing to do with, and not wanted at home as her mother blames her for the death of her dad. She also looks a lot like a duck.The other lead is Matthew, played by Martin Donovan in deadpan mode. He is a marginally psychotic TV repairman who is bullied by his single Dad and carries a grenade around with him.Real people dealing with real issues.There is much more of a plot than Maria and Matthew meet, share their problems and decide to make a go of things together, the action occurs as they progress through and come into contact with the various other characters in the film.No-one seems to get along, Maria's mum hates her, and later Matthew. Matthew's dad hates him, and everyone else it seems. Matthew is an angry loner who hates everyone and everyone hates, which leaves Maria and her unborn child as the victim of a tug of war.Everyone in the film seems to be 5% off-normal, not quite enough to be a caricature, but more than enough that they could all aptly be described as weird (at least) by normal people.In this vein Hartley is like Kevin Smith (really), he puts people that you might almost convince yourself that could exist, and in fact you might know someone who really reminds of one of them, only he fills every role with these one-in-a-million characters, so you have a town full of people that would ordinarily be the nut-job.The dialogue is scripted down to the nth degree, which unfortunately leads to conversations that alternate between snappy and robotic, at times in the same scene. At times it is almost like the characters are starting their response before the other sentence is finished.This film is most notable to me as being the first film I can remember seeing that had a character say the C-word, and a female character at that. If this sounds juvenile it is because when I watched the film I was, so it was a genuine surprise to me to see such a taboo word bandied about in an art house film.Even now that I watch this movie and see that I perhaps was looking at my memories with rose coloured glasses, there are moments that are both calculated that still have an impact, you know that the director is trying to scream "this is important" and want to ignore it but it still works.Like a good sad ballad, you know it is simply trying to manipulate your emotions, but turn off the lights and crank it loud and you can't help but caught up in it. Only Trust is a 90+ minute movie, it's hard to be "swept along" for that long when everything is so mechanical.Final Rating - 6.5 - 10. As I said at times it works, there are just too many dead spots in between those times.If you liked this review (or even if you didn't) check out oneguyrambling.com