TRASH MOUNTAIN
(The Toronto International Film Festival (or TIFF) runs September 10-20 and HtN has boots on the ground covering all the best indie films they have to offer. Check out Clara Cuccaro’s Trash Mountain movie review from the fest! Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
Kris Rey’s newest film Trash Mountain is about two half-siblings Gavin (Caleb Hearon) and Abbi (Zooey Deschanel) trying their best to not completely lose it. They’re processing the death of their recently deceased father, a reclusive hoarder with a lot of guns, some floppy disc porn, and a yellow lunch box among other “priceless” objects. Stuck together through one helluva a mess, Gavin and Abbi’s relationship, along with Hearon and Deschanel’s effortless chemistry, keeps this coming-of-age drama grounded in real warmth and humor rather than early 2000s indie cliches.
Trash Mountain is centered around Gavin’s trip back home to small town Missouri and his eventual reckoning with his past. Despite being raised in the Show-Me State, Gavin is now a city kid. He lives in Chicago where he emcees a popular drag show, so returning home feels suffocating, especially when a former classmate tells him he’s “brave” for being gay at the local Walmart. On the same trip to the Walton family store, Gavin mocks his conservative home state with a t-shirt that says, “I love Beer, Golf, and My Wife in that order,” a nice sartorial touch that pops up throughout the film. His attire often expresses his unsaid emotional state like when he wears an “I Miss David Lynch” novelty tee while sorting through the rubble. Gavin’s experience is not exactly Lynchian, but there are times when his life at home is giving midwestern gothic like when Grandma Helen (Jacki Weaver) is crying in the living room with perfectly coiffed bleached blonde hair and everyone else is scrambling around, looking for their father’s long lost social security card.
Luckily, Gavin takes refuge from the chaos with Abbi, where a shared sense of humor is a survival tactic despite their life stages—Abbi is a settled-down mother of two, while Gavin won’t even give his phone number to his Grindr crush. Hearon and Deschanel have wonderful chemistry, and their rapport is complimented by their excellent comedic timing. Case in point: after a rare night of heavy drinking, a hungover Abbi, hunched over the kitchen sink, groans to ask what time they stumbled in, only for Gavin to respond with total sincerity, “Honestly, dawg, 10:30.” During that same night out, a karaoke duet taps directly into Deschanel’s She & Him era, a band that was constantly playing on my iPod circa 2008, bridging together two generations of indie darling (for context, Hearon is currently the Gen Z king of comedy).
Written by Hearon and Ruby Caster, Trash Mountain is partially inspired by the passing of Hearon’s father, and it’s the balance of humor and catharsis that make the script so effective. At times, the film is a little too quirky with Gavin’s constant need for the last word, but overtime it becomes abundantly clear that his humor is a defense mechanism for his pain that can come across as borderline cruel. After Abbi and Gavin take a bit about their father’s obituary a little too far, Grandma Helen cuts through their bullshit, reminding them that “caring the least does not make you the smartest.”
Rey’s direction allows Grandma Helen’s reality check to land throughout the film. Guided by her steady pacing, Hearon and Caster’s script strikes the right level of emotional balance and clarity rather than becoming overly twee. Hearon and Deschanel ground the rest of the film with a sibling dynamic that recalls the best of modern brother-sister dramedies like Little Miss Sunshine and The Skeleton Twins. Their effortless interplay combined with their unresolved childhood trauma give Trash Mountain some genuine weight, anchoring even the script’s more contrived setups like Grandma Helen’s obsession with her absurd, evangelical preacher, a human touch.
