Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jacy Mairs
Starring: Esther Harrison, Brianna Paige Dague, Eddie Wollrabe,
Chloe Kramer, Riva Ren Martin
Turning 13 can be an intense and confusing time. One day you're bouncing
on a trampoline with your childhood friends and buying a slushie at the
local grocery store, and the next you're asking some older kid if you can
have a puff on their joint or a sip of their beer. It's the time when
adults start to tell you that you're no longer a child, that you have to
adopt the responsibilities of adulthood, while simultaneously steering you
away from all the fun parts of being an adult. As Britney Spears sang,
it's the time when you feel you're not a girl, not quite a woman.
A poster of that noughties icon hangs on the bedroom wall of Stevie (Esther Harrison), the adolescent protagonist of writer/director Jacy Mair's
feature debut Trash Baby. It's 2003 and Oregon trailer park kid Stevie has just turned 13. Stevie
likes nothing more than having sleepovers with her bestie Maria (Riva Ren Martin), the two girls spending their nights lying on a trampoline and gazing
at the stars in the clear Oregon sky. But Stevie's life is changed when
she's befriended by her 20-year-old neighbour Edie (Chloe Kramer).
Stevie loves how Edie paints her face like a grownup, but Edie also lures
Stevie into an adult world she's unprepared for, one in which male
vultures circle in baggy jeans, carrying skateboards they can barely
ride.
Trash Baby falls somewhere between Larry Clark's exploitative studies of
troubled teens and Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade in its tale of an adolescent girl placing herself in danger in her
desperation to escape childhood. It shares some beats with Burnham's film
but plays them in far grittier fashion. But at the same time it never
leans into the nihilism of Clark's broad depiction of white trash kids.
The world here is filled with people who want to help Stevie, some who
want to cause her harm, and some who genuinely can't tell the difference.
Stevie's home life is governed by a mother (Brianna Paige Dague)
who believes she's doing her best for Stevie while allowing a procession
of creepy men to parade through her trailer. The closest Stevie has to a
father figure is Brad (Eddie Wollrabe), an older boy who does his
best to keep her out of trouble, his brotherly instincts misread by
Stevie, who develops a crush on her guardian angel. Edie is genuinely
sweet and caring towards Stevie, but she puts the younger girl in harm's
way by association.
Anchored by a remarkable turn by newcomer Harrison, who expresses the shy
Stevie's conflicting and confused emotions largely non-verbally, Trash Baby has a lived-in authenticity that might suggest an explicit
familiarity with this world on the part of its writer/director. Avoiding
the usual clichés of white working class representation in American
cinema, Mairs clearly has an affection for the community spirit of such a
milieu while also acknowledging the threats it poses for young women. Her
debut shares more in common with female-centred British social realist
dramas like David Greene's I Start Counting, Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank and Helen Walsh's The Violators than with the typical American indie drama. Mairs adds small
details that add much texture to her film's world, like how the kitchen
tap doesn't work in Stevie's trailer, forcing her to melt ice cubes in the
microwave when she gets thirsty. It's an early insight that speaks to how
smart and resourceful Stevie is, and yet she still finds herself out of
depth when the realities of the adult world present themselves to
her.
The latter leads to a harrowing scene in which Stevie witnesses a
blackout drunk Edie unknowingly suffer a sexual assault at the hands of
her male "friends." That the setting for this pivotal incident is Stevie's
trampoline, the film's visual motif for the childhood she's running away
from, makes it all the more heartbreaking. A conventional film might make
Stevie's reaction to this crime the centrepiece of the drama, but Trash Baby moves on, Stevie avoiding Edie, partly out of shame for not
intervening, partly out of fear that she might be similarly
targeted.
There's something of David Lynch's Blue Velvet in how Trash Baby balances the darkness of lost innocence with the lighter side of
adolescence. For every tense scene in which we fear for Stevie's safety
around adults, most of whom ironically lack her maturity, there's a
beautiful depiction of the simple pleasures of childhood. Stevie's
friendship with Maria is brutally honest in depicting how easily kids can
turn on their best friends in order to impress others, but when the two
share a late hug as Maria's parents violently argue in the background,
it's a profoundly moving expression of adolescent female solidarity in the
face of an encroaching adult world filled with uncertainty and
danger.
