Available on DVD: “Trust”



Liana Liberato and Catherine Keener in Trust

Trust is a very good movie that few will rent, because it deals with a subject that makes people squirm. What’s more, it deals with this subject effectively, which means that audiences most definitely will squirm and wish they were anywhere but home watching this, despite the fact that it features some of Clive Owen’s best work and a startling movie debut by the 15-year-old Texan Liana Liberato.

Yet for those that can take it, Trust is a special experience.

Set in a Chicago suburb, it’s the story of a girl who becomes the victim of a sexual predator. Young Annie (Liberato) thinks she has struck up an Internet friendship with a boy her own age who lives in California. They chat around the clock, and the boy reveals that, in fact, he is 20. Later, “Charlie” confesses to being 25. Then he announces that he is coming to Chicago, and when she goes to meet him at the mall, she finds a 40-year-old man with a sickening smile and a smooth line of talk about how age doesn’t matter.

Clearly, Charlie is well played by actor Chris Henry Coffey, because the moment you see this guy, you want to smash his face against the wall. Repeatedly. So it’s easy to get inside the mind of the girl’s father (Owen) who, upon finding out that his daughter has been taken advantage of by a middle-aged scum, starts becoming unhinged. He wants to find the guy and kill him.

Trust provides a chance for Owen to be nothing like the cool, unflappable fellow we know from most of his other pictures. He starts the movie as a loving, outgoing husband and father, then becomes angry and helpless, his emotions close to the surface. Trust is not a crowd-pleasing revenge film. If it were, it would have been far too popular for me to discuss on this journal. Instead it’s about the specific consequences of this particular crime, how it affects relationships, self-image and the family structure.

Some of the most profound consequences are psychological. The predator worms his way into the mind of a 14-year-old girl, convincing her that this is love, that he cares about her, that he thinks she’s beautiful. So in the aftermath, she doesn’t know what has happened to her. She’s a child and doesn’t know if she has been raped or if her parents and the authorities are aligning themselves against the one man who understands her.

Catherine Keener lends sympathetic support as the mother, but she is essentially there to bear witness to a pair of remarkable performances, from Owen and Liberato. Both go to deep places of emotion, and for that, some of the credit has to go to David Schwimmer, who directed. He sets Owen loose and provides a safe environment for Liberato to take things to the outer edges of feeling, to levels of despair, anguish and hysteria that movies rarely dare.