Talky and amateurish, WHITE TRASH aspires to wring art from the miserable lives of street hustlers, but fails dismally.
Casino (John Hartman) and Rio (Sean Christiansen) are young Los Angeles street hustlers with few ambitions. Their roommate, seventeen-year-old Rita (Periel Marr)--also a prostitute--has recently found a focus for her life: she's pregnant by her boyfriend CC (Brian Patrick), and wants to have the
baby, though she continues to hustle and use drugs. CC's death from AIDS precipitates a crisis in their lives. First, they must get wasted enough to make it through his funeral, a task made difficult by the fact that they're all broke. Rita sleeps with kinky dealer Percy (Wheaton James) in
exchange for drugs. Then, after the funeral, CC's father (Jack Betts) and sister (Winnie Thexton) come by to visit. They offer to take Rita back to New Jersey with them, so she can have CC's baby. Rio and Casino taunt them, but CC's family eventually depart with Rita, leaving the two hustlers to
return to the streets.
WHITE TRASH seems intended to be a gritty, razor-edged look at the hopeless lives of three Hollywood hustlers, laced with trenchant observations about race, class and sexual oppression in contemporary Los Angeles. The lurid title and funky rap score might fool exploitation fans into thinking it's
a sleazy, no-holds-barred wallow in the neon slime a la VICE SQUAD or any of the numerous slice-of-lowlife pictures designed to serve up vicarious thrills with a dash of legitimizing social censure, but WHITE TRASH doesn't deliver those goods.
Written by Mel Clay (THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR) and directed by Fred Baker (whose long career in motion pictures has taken him from acting to distribution), WHITE TRASH is righteously ambitious, determined not to paint prostitution in the fairy tale strokes of PRETTY WOMAN. It fails, however,
to forge those high-minded aspirations into compelling drama. Some of the film's faults can be laid at the door of budget: the film is painfully set-bound, with most of the action (if relentless talk can be properly termed "action") taking place in the nondescript apartment Rio, Casino and Rita
share, and the photography and lighting are at best competent. But its inadequacies run deeper.
The screenplay is shapeless, and while this may be intended as the structural reflection of the aimless lives of young hustlers, it makes it difficult to stick with the film--it's boring and pointless. Even worse, the individual scenes flop and flounder, feeling at best like improvised acting
exercises and at worst like amateur self-indulgence. It's all talk, crafted to shock but without weight or impact; the result is off-putting, like hearing children mouth dirty words they clearly don't understand. Though the performers all seem to be trying their best, they're undermined at every
turn by the film's technical inadequacies; it's possible none of them is up to making the material work, but they don't even get the chance to try.
In the end, WHITE TRASH succeeds neither as sexploitation nor as serious social commentary, failing at both because it's too dull to hold the attention of either highbrow or lowbrow audiences. (Substance abuse, profanity, sexual situations, adult situations.) leave a comment
