‘Trust’ (R)

As a filmmaker, Hal Hartley is an odd combination -- a baggy-pants comic in a lab coat. He's made two features, "The Unbelievable Truth" and now "Trust," and both are cool, strikingly original case studies of middle-class anomie. Not many filmmakers have run their fingers along the scrubbed-down Formica countertops of suburbia and found their inspiration, but this is the territory Hartley knows best, and he walks it like an assured specialist, his ears keen to every cracked inflection, every palpitating rhythm.

The backdrop for both movies is Long Island, where Hartley grew up, and in each the environment is a cruelly impersonal one. In "Trust," the setting is a cross between Beaver Cleaver's home town and a minimum-security prison; it's a sort of suburban gulag where quiet desperation rules until someone goes haywire and all hell breaks loose. And hell has broken loose with a vengeance in the life of Maria (Adrienne Shelly). One morning, as she applies an extra coat of purple lipstick, she casually informs her parents that she's been kicked out of high school yet again. Not to worry, though. Her boyfriend (Gary Sauer), the school's star football player, is going to marry her and, after college, provide for her in the manner to which she is accustomed. He has to, she says. She's pregnant.

Hearing this, Maria's father calls her a slut and she slaps his face and marches out of the house in a rage to tell her boyfriend. A bonehead jock with dreams of scholarships and a career in the NFL, he has not the slightest interest in playing papa while his once-foxy wife blimps up in front of the tube. The high school hallways here look familiar from countless John Hughes films, but Hartley pounces on precisely what Hughes leaves out, the core emotions of his teen material. Parents and children negotiate for power in earnest here; it's not a game, it's for real. And there are real winners and losers. It's "Not So Pretty in Pink."

Maria's rejection shocks her into looking squarely into her own eyes, and she doesn't much like what she sees. During a visit to an abortion clinic, Maria tells the nurse -- who pours them both a stiff drink -- that she wonders whether her lover has seen anything of her besides her face and her body. But how could he, she says. There's nothing else there.

As it turns out, it's a good thing Maria had that drink. When she gets home, she discovers that her slap to the face caused her father to die of a coronary, prompting her outraged mother (Merritt Nelson) to toss her out of the house. And it gets worse. Hoping to drink away her troubles, she wanders down to a convenience store, where the cashier tries to rape her and a depressed housewife snatches another woman's baby from its stroller. What a day!

Though this pileup of misfortune may seem ludicrous, Hartley handles it as if it were perfectly natural, bouncing from one disaster to the next without pause. And while Maria's life is unraveling, a parallel series of woes is descending on Matthew (Martin Donovan), a tightly wound, chain-smoking loner who teaches himself physics and keeps a live hand grenade close by for days such as these. We're introduced to Matthew at the computer factory where he works, and within minutes he's jamming the head of his supervisor into a vise -- a move that costs him his job and brings down the wrath of his perversely tyrannical father (John MacKay).

Matthew and Maria are kindred spirits, and at first, more ward mates than romantic partners. They discover each other in an abandoned building where both have taken refuge, and instead of meeting cute, they interrogate each other skeptically, as if they were scanning for symptoms, checking the charts for signs of disease. Hartley's methods are those of a disciplined clinician; he keeps his stylistic head even while his characters are losing theirs. Not everything in the picture responds to his controlling hand. Some scenes seem overscaled and hysterical, and at times the precision deadpan of his farce timing winds down.

Also, it can't be easy for Hartley's actors to live within the Godardian soap opera universe he's created, and some of them are better than others. (The fathers in his movies tend to be grotesque caricatures.) His stars, though, seem to know exactly what he wants. Shelly has come to specialize in this particular variety of confused but headstrong teenage waif. (She starred in "The Unbelievable Truth" too.) Until now, Maria hasn't thought much about her life; dressed in her bandage-wrapped neon skirts and tops, she was content to let her body do the talking. She liked being hell on wheels. Now that she's landed in trouble, though, she hungers for some form of definition; she wants to be somebody, though she's not sure who, and Shelly brings a desperate sense of focus to Maria's search. Stripped of her bimbo regalia, she seems vulnerable and uncertain, fresh out of the womb of her rebirth.

As Matthew, Donovan doesn't undergo such a drastic transformation, but there's a chance that by the movie's end, he's discovered a reason to live. As an actor, Donovan looks like everything Andrew McCarthy would like to be when he grows up. He smolders without pouting, and he gives the character a genuine quality of danger; you know why people shy away from him in fear when he slumps into a bar. Matthew is damaged goods, warped by anger and frustration. And Donovan gives full dimension to his suffering; no kid stuff here.

Hartley is truly someone to get excited about. His movies have their own sure, distinctive voice; though you can trace his sources and track the genesis of his style, his movies aren't like any you've ever seen before. As both writer and director, he's capable of shifting with ease from realism to absurdism, from glum despair to blank-faced comedy. They're dark and yet boldly, brightly colored, talky yet filled with glowering silences. In "Trust," Matthew and Maria are too messed up to respond to a quick fix, and Hartley is savvy enough not to force one on them. He leaves them in flux, still searching, still suffering, still stuck like specimens under his microscope. He's started them on their way, but the research continues.

"Trust" contains adult language and subject matter.