3 gibbles out of 5

Director: David Schwimmer

There’s a wild new drug on the street: INTERNET.  AND YOUR KIDS ARE USING IT.

“Trust” isn’t all that dated.  It does a good job of playing the cyber-crime story for a mainstream audience without resorting to too much faux-computer jibber-jabber.  Of course, it helps that grandmothers are Twittering nowadays, so lord hopes we’d at least be able to accurately represent texting.

Which director David Schwimmer (yes, that David Schwimmer) does by integrating the texts right atop the screen, almost like subtitles, with the color of the text letting us know who’s doing the “talking”.  It’s a simple trick that shows that this topic is grown up, and doesn’t require a lead-in explaining what texting is or showing a closeup of someone typing on  a phone so we get the point.  Trust excels when it skips over the whole “cyber” aspect of it and just shows how this happens and how it ends up affecting us.

Clive Owen and Catherine Keener are good parents.  Trusting.  They’ve raised three smart kids, one of whom, the eldest boy, is heading off to college.  Annie (Liana Liberato) is at the awesome high school age of maturity where you start to have just enough knowledge of yourself to establish an identity but, well, you’re still a kid.    Annie gets a computer for a birthday present and its added to her tech arsenal of iPhone to assist with the non-stop communication with friends.  She meets a boy online from another school.  She tells her parents about him.  She doesn’t tell her parents when he reveals that he’s older than her.

What follows will be familiar to any Law & Order: SVU viewer.  Annie is raped by an older man she met online.  The film’s  true intent is to show the after affects of Annie’s ordeal, and the affect on her parents.  It’s painfully realistic at times.  You can see how charming her attacker is; you can see each parent’s struggle to come to terms with what’s happened and whether or not there will be a resolution.  Liana is phenomenal in the role, finding the proper poise for her character to balance the unexpected blend of emotions that would result from such a scenario.  Owen and Keener act well, as usual, and the roles are written sensibly, but their function feel more like “film” roles as opposed to the drama that unfolds directly around Annie.

And that’s where “Trust” gets a little mixed.  The procedural aspect is fascinating, but that’s what SVU does and does well, key concepts boiled down to 40 minutes per episode.  ‘Trust’ expands upon that and mixes it with some movie subplots, all while pursuing an ultimate goal of exploring a topic.  So it doesn’t manage to hit high notes in any category as it spends valuable time trying to tie the styles together.

"It's people. The Internet is made out of people..."