Likeable but a tad overlong and sometimes overly familiar, this City Of God meets Waste Land drama engages thanks to the performances. It certainly steadies the good ship Daldry whose last two outings – The Reader and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close – didn’t quite work.
Before he is shot by police, a man (Wagner Moura) tosses a wallet into the street. The wallet is found by Brazilian teenager Raphael (Rickson Tevez), a homeless youth who, along with friends Gardo (Eduardo Luis) and the sewer-dwelling Rat (Gabriel Weinstein), barely make ends meet by sifting through the trash at the local dump. The money found delights but further exploration of the wallet’s cavities reveal pictures and numbers that resemble a code. With the police, headed up by the heartless detective Frederico (Mello), on the payroll of a corrupt politician, chasing down the wallet, the boys realise that the wallet’s contents are the key to a political scandal involving murder and embezzlement.
It might retain the writer’s penchant for sentimentality and upbeat endings, but Trash is a departure for Richard Curtis (Four Weddings, Notting Hill). He’s quite cynical here, wallowing in the, as Trash would have it, unfettered corruption and violence that permeates Brazilian society. He has no qualms showing kids tortured by police, who happily take pot shots at the unarmed heroes.
With the plot unfolding episodically – clues lead to an imprisoned political activist who informs them that the numbers refer to bible passages and so on and so forth, Trash can plateau early and engagement with the characters’ plight can stall. Thankfully, the performances save the day.
Tevez, Luis and Weinstein are a delight – the delivery of the light-hearted banter was expected but it's during Trash’s dramatic moments that the amateurs surprise, as if maturing as actors with the film's progress. Despite their efforts, it is Mello that shines. In what could have been a forgettable bad guy, it’s his tired brand of nastiness that catches the eye. Sheen and Mara, a world-weary American priest and a wide-eyed aid worker respectively, are sideshow marquee names to put on the poster. There’s little they add to the proceedings with the film belonging to the three teens and Mello’s charismatic villain.