Review: Trust (2011)

Trust
2011
100 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

The most pleasantly surprising thing about David Schwimmer's Trust is just how much it, yes, trusts the audience. There is a refreshing lack of melodrama and a lack of explicit moral exposition that truly makes it an adult picture in the best sense of the word. Its subject matter (a young girl who has unwilling sex with a much older man she met online) could easily be the stuff of either tawdry sensationalism or finger-wagging pontification. But Schwimmer is not making a John Walsh-ish epic about the sexual predators who are around every corner just waiting to violate our daughters. He instead sets out to tell a very specific story about a specific family that happens to undergo a traumatic ordeal, and he refuses to lecture. While it is a flawed and occasionally frustrating picture, Trust has the decency to respect our intelligence.

Credit where Credit is Due: David Schwimmer's Trust gets a tasteful, low-key domestic trailer from Millennium Entertainment.

I wrote a piece last December about the MPAA granted an R-rating to the David Schwimmer-directed drama Trust, which involved a teenage girl attacked by a predator she met online. The US distribution company, Millennium Entertainment, appealed the rating arguing that kids should see the film because it was a cautionary tale. I responded that the film, based on the international trailer and the poster, seemed to be a piece of exploitation that took an unlikely situation and tried to pass it off as a 'this WILL happen to you' fable. Alas, I did not realize that Millennium Films (the international distributor) and Millennium Entertainment (the US distributor) were two different companies, so basically I was faulting one distribution company for the sensationalist marketing campaign of another. Anyway, now that the US theatrical trailer has been released, I can say that I genuinely owe Millennium Entertainment an apology.

David Schwimmer's Trust to appeal R-rating, wants kids to see sensationalist view of online predators.

Millennium Entertainment has announced today that they are appealing the R-rating that was handed down to the David Schwimmer-directed thriller Trust. The film was rated R for 'the assault of a teenage girl, language, sexual content and some violence'. The gist of the appeal is that the film, which concerns parents (Clive Owen and Catherine Keener) reactions when their teenage daughter is sexually assaulted by someone she met online, should serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of kids playing around online. First of all, if this is the kind of film that kids should see and discuss with their parents, would the film not benefit from an 'R' rating, which would in fact require parents to see it with their kids? More importantly, we should be asking if the film (which of course none of us have seen) or at least the prior marketing of said film (from Millennium Films, not Millennium Entertainment) was perhaps overstating the case. Point being, it's easy to imagine your kid being tricked online into meeting a stranger at the mall and getting attacked. But how often does that actually happen? Not as much as you think.