I'd seen it years ago, but I'm glad I got a chance to see Hal Hartley's Trust (1990) on IFC last night. (It's showing again today at noon) I can't help wondering if IFC added Trust to its schedule because of the presence of the late Adrienne Shelly, the film's leading lady currently getting some overdue critical respect for directing the comedy Waitress.
The plot of Trust is deceptively simple. Teenage Maria (Shelly) announces to her family that she's pregnant. An argument with her father ensues, and when Maria slaps him he immediately drops dead of a heart attack. Spurned by her grief-stricken mother (Merritt Nelson), Maria strikes up an unlikely and chaste friendship with Matthew (Martin Donovan). Matthew's life seems to consist mainly of a job at a computer factory (where he continually complains about quality control) and a home life with his sadistic father (John Mackay).
If you've never seen a Hartley film, it's a little hard to describe his world. The dialogue is deadpan, the humor is dry, and choices have comically instantaneous consequences. (A woman speaking about a deceased child steals a baby that's conveniently left outside a store) But Trust contains a good bit more than its austere surface suggests. One of the themes the film keeps returning to is the compromises women make by becoming wives and mothers. Maria's mother and live-at-home older sister (Edie Falco way before Carmela Soprano) both seem to have never wanted any more than domesticity, a choice Maria symbolically rejects by wearing her glasses (which she earlier complained made her look "brainy") and reading Matthew's books. Trust may be the only movie ever made in which a man gives a woman flowers and a thesaurus at the same time.
While Maria is blossoming, Matthew is fading. We're told he's a mechanical genius who can fix anything, but after he gets fired from the computer factory he refuses to take a fix-it job because he'll have to work on TV's. Later, after he's pledged to marry Maria and gotten his job back, Maria finds him zoned out in front of the TV and they argue. The image of TV-carrying customers lined up outside the door of the fix-it shop is one of Trust's most pointed shots.
I think the key scene in Trust is a conversation that occurs between Maria and the nurse (Karen Sillas) she has met (and shared a drink with) at an abortion clinic earlier in the film. (Sillas plays a major role in Hartley's Simple Men) Maria complains about how the now TV-obsessed Matthew is changing, and the nurse asks, "Hasn't he changed you?" That's what Trust is really all about: the way people unexpectedly collide, learn from, trust, and change each other in a world where actions have consequences. Trust resonates all the more because of its simplicity, and (along with Waitress) serves as tribute to the too short life of Adrienne Shelly.
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