Director David Schwimmer’s Trust is a horrifying look at how living life online has opened our private lives up to the public and made us vulnerable to predators in potentially dangerous ways; especially for young people who don’t know any better. It’s a story about Clive Owen and Catherine Keener having a 14-year-old daughter who makes some bad decisions when she lets an online romance with a 15-year-old boy who turns out to be a 35-year-old-man go too far.
Trust has got a lot of good stuff in it, but ultimately it comes off as something of a missed opportunity. The performances are all generally spectacular, especially from the young girl, Liana Liberato, who is asked to ground some pretty broad material, and who performs her job spectacularly, Clive Owen, who is as intense and compelling as ever as a father who feels both powerless and alienated from his daughter, and Chris Henry Coffey, whose smiling, affable take on the child molester feels so much more creepy and real than the slimy, mustache-twirling take we usually get. Unfortunately, even though the actors are doing great work throughout, the material they’re working with is a little questionable.
Trust reaches after school special levels of melodrama. From online stalking, to sex predators, to cyber bullying, to teen suicide, Trust tries to tackle every hot button issue that’s scaring us in regards to our kids all at once, and consequently it comes off as preachy and ridiculous when it could have been an eye-opening meditation on just one of these matters. Liberato’s character just goes too far into making stupid decisions too fast, and the movie never touches the brakes from that point on. She has a great family, a happy life, and seemingly no prior history of abuse, so it comes off as infuriatingly dumb that she would so easily and effortlessly become a victim this many times over. In trying to create an “it could happen to anyone” message, Schwimmer overplays his hand and earns eye-rolls instead. Credit should be given to him for casting an age-appropriate actress to play the daughter, however. Too many other films would have cast an older, already sexy girl and played the scenes where she’s in her underwear in front of her abuser as tantalizing one minute and then tragic the next. Liberato is much too young to be in these situations, not at all alluring when we see more of her than we should, and it really makes how awful these crimes are hit home in a way these movies often miss in favor of sticking to Hollywood convention and a “sex sells” marketing plan.
