Movie Review: Trash Fire (2016)
Wanna feel lucky and appreciative you’ve not been born in The Bible Belt? Trash Fire with its satire and dark humor will fit the occasion. That is, if you like dramas mixed with dark comedy.
Writer, director Richard Bates, Jr. has become somewhat of an expert in developing this sort of movies during the last decade: he shows little mercy to his characters and makes some interesting casting choices. In Trash Fire we see Fionnula Flanagan of The Others fame cast as grandmother Violet, and then there’s Adrian Grenier (playing Violet’s grandson Owen Roberts, a web designer suffering from epilepsy), who’s acting credits include roles in Spielberg & Kubrick’s A.I. Articial Intelligence and David Frankel’s The Devil Wears Prada, and more recently tv series called Clickbait. Furthermore, Owen’s disfigured sister Pearl is played by AnnaLynne McCord, who starred in Bates’s feature debut Excision back in 2012 as Pauline – the role which led to numerous nominations for the title of the best actress. She had also been involved in two of Bates’s latest films: King Knight and Tone-Deaf.
Alongside Grenier we see Angela Trimbur, whom horror fans might recognize as Sarah from 2018’s home invasion thriller Trespassers; in this movie Angela plays interior designer Isabel, Owen’s girlfriend.
Trash Fire movie poster. Source
Much of the complexity of characters and their interpersonal relationships in the movie rests, in my opinion, on deductive reasoning – two words that are mentioned by Isabel to her brother Caleb (played by Matthew Gray Gubler – another actor Bates had been collaborating with on a number of projects) at a hospital, where Owen ends up after going through particularly severe seizure. This sort of reasoning seems to be that weapon, thanks to the charm of which Bates just takes no prisoners when revealing secrets, environments, deficiencies and traumas people live with, or had been living with. As an example here’s a dialogue between Owen and Isabel right before and during coitus:
She: I’m gonna have to pretend it was another man’s penis inside me.
He: I’m okay with that.
She: Okay
Minutes later.
She: What’s going on? It normally doesn’t take you this long.
He: It’s been like 30 seconds.
She: I know. Is everything okay?
He: Maybe it’s your complete lack of enthusiasm?
She: Well, your balls smell real bad.
He: I wanted to keep us in the moment.
She: Just take a shower next time.
He: You know what? I’m gonna go jerk off in the bathroom.
She: Don’t use the towels.
There is virtually nothing happy in Trash Fire. So what do people do? Break up? No. They try and rekindle the relationship, which seems to have once been happy, starting with someone being lonely while the other person had been drunk. The movie shows us how much of all that had, or hadn't changed over the years.
Trash Fire is partly about how people go about solving that problem of disfunctional relationship. Another part of the film is about how someone had been “hatef*cked into this world” and what it had led to. And all of that on the backdrop of religion. Pointing out the moral issues of living in sin as well as the experience of God’s will that’s revealed through voices all form a big part of what our two protagonists receive as a support from their siblings. I was trying to identify love somewhere among the things that had been said and done in Trash Fire, but all I can remember right now from it are, as Owen puts it, "banal pleasantries" as well as acts out of sense of duty, and just pure hate. Sometimes it may feel like there is something else in there, like when Isabel, in a not too subtle manner, points out to Owen when is the time to say something comforting to her; or when Owen tells Isabel why he's glad they both took that trip to visit his grandmother. But one has to be able to keep his attention sharp throughout the film to spot those brief moments that attest to a genuine bond between the two. And then there's Pearl, who's motivations most of the time aren't that clear, yet she doesn't come across as a character that would harbor hate and negativity.
Despite the comedy part in it, it certainly isn’t a film that will cheer you up in the end. When I first watched it in April 2019, I wrote in my diary: “Trash Fire – clever film about problems during upbringing, doctrines, sexual relationships and broken fates. Excellent soundtrack.” I should add that the plot structure is of the same quality as the movie's soundtrack. Quality stuff.
Peer Ynt
Trash Fire is available for streaming on Tubi
this sounds like something I would enjoy and it is "off the beaten track" a bit..... which appeals to me. It is something I likely would have never heard of if you haven't put it here, so thanks for that.
I'll see later if I can find this one. Vurious what the Bible belt has to do with it (lived there). 🍀💖
There's a lot of religion in Trash Fire; people's lives are very dependent on it.
Source
I'm familiar with that life threats included and not being liked plus the lack of freedom. Today it all comes back worldwide without a god but the same attitude.
It's somewhat curious what associations my review ends up evoking in someone. I guess, the general vibe would be familiar to everyone who'd dared to rebel against a conservative or ultra conservative society. My observations over the years had led me to conclude that the more someone relies on their supposed moral high ground in their fight against immorality, non righteous, undeserving individuals, the more explicit becomes their inability to notice the immorality in things they themselves are thinking and doing. I guess God indeed works in mysterious ways...
The fight against immorality... what is immorality what is preached or believed without questioning? It still gives me the creeps if I think back of that life and the hypocrisy if it cames to right and wrong, the never ending judging.
Great you receive comments with different visions.
Good luck on Steemit. 🍀💖
Hypocrisy with its art of saying things one doesn't really mean, and then judging people - it all sounds pretty much like the good old self righteousness to me.
Hypocrisy, in fact, seems like a natural feature in a society like that because it'd be necessary for survival. God be merciful to those who become such mob's targets; I'm guessing the expertise they'd have to develop in all that in order to survive would equal to going insane.
If you are in charge there's no chance to get insane. What is preached is believed and all faith is put in the 'fact' god speaks to them and they are almighty.
In the village I lived I found one doctor was different from the rest of the village. Het told me how he had been called to an accident. Het had to scrape the body of little child of the road. The child was hit by a car. Dad told him to cross the traffic road.
Father ordered the boy to cross the road. The child was run over by a car. The only thing the father said was: it is God's will. So the suffering is over. It must be easy to think like that. No sorrow, no burden of shame or guilt. Everything is simply God's will.
I have never been able to deal with this and have never understood it, but I have seen that it is not so much a rock-solid trust in god with the accompanying contentment and happy life, but a piece of brain damage. Perhaps inbreeding on the bible belt is the result of this. A normal conversation is unfortunately not possible, there is no room for a different opinion or even questions about what is preached. Questioning what a person says is life-threatening.
Glitch (season 2/3 I believe) paints a good picture of what life looks like and the 'loyalty' some feel.
Perhaps it isn't brain damage, but the reflection of the sense of self worth? I mean, if someone isn't seeing their own life amounting to much, that may then extend to everyone else around them. Moreover, if one considers the fact that one of the fundamentals in respective religion is the sense of being a worthless sinner in the eyes of God; who is pretty much a ruthless despot...
But all of that, of course, is just my speculation, based largely on some things I have myself observed in parts of society where doctrines, dogmas and a general shortage of available information prevail.
Thanks for mentioning Glitch. I however don't know which one of the three different series you mean. And I can return the favor if you're interested - Salem series from a few years ago. There's a good part of that hypocrisy and survival involved that I have mentioned earlier.