Trash (2014)

Stephen Daldry's Trash arrives with its conscience fully fastened, a Working Title production adapted by Richard Curtis from Andy Mulligan's novel and set among the refuse pickers of Rio de Janeiro. Three boys, Raphael, Gardo, and Rat, find a wallet in a landfill and are promptly converted into whistleblowers against a police force that has monetized its own corruption. The film is competently assembled and genuinely tense when it runs. It never lets us forget that it has Something To Say, and it says it loudly.

The three leads are played by actual Brazilian youths drawn from communities resembling the ones depicted, which lends the film a texture that a cast of imported professionals would have flattened. The injustice on offer is rooted in class and graft. The villains are cops and officials who have turned poverty into an industry, and the screenplay's sympathies run toward the poor as a category. This is old-fashioned anger at crooked institutions, not a newer vocabulary of identity, and the film seems content to let the audience finish the thought on its own.

Where the picture declines to travel is instructive. There is no romantic subplot of consequence, no engagement with sexuality, no environmental sermon, no interest in body or mind as categories of struggle. Rooney Mara's Sister Olivia is capable and largely decorative, a witness rather than an engine, and the screenplay never argues a thesis about gender. What remains is a well-meaning adventure with a sermon tucked under its arm, the sort of picture that wants credit for its subject matter and mostly earns it. It is sincere. It is occasionally moving. It is also the kind of cinema that congratulates the viewer for two hours of moral attention. A respectable vintage, if not a complicated one.