“You don’t have to be sorry, babygirl, this shit hurts,” Edie (Chloe Kramer) tells Stevie (Esther Harrison) as she tweezes her eyebrows for the first time in “Trash Baby,” sitting on the porch of her house in Pine Park where the two have had adjoining trailers for years. Still, the two have rarely connected given their eight-year age gap and Stevie’s mother Lana (Brianna Paige Dague) has tried her best to keep her daughter away when there’s more than a little of herself she sees in Stevie, who lounges around all day in her early twenties and raises hell at night with her pal Samantha (Makenna DeCaro) and some local skater boys in a town where anything that hasn’t burned down to the ground already looks like kindling for a fire. Yet as Stevie is quite literally on the cusp of becoming a teenager, likely having her last birthday party to take place at a bowling alley as she turns 13, and as she’s increasingly annoyed by having to keep watch over her younger brother and conversation with the kids her own age seems juvenile, the promise of lip gloss and nail polish that lives just across the way seems like the portal to another world.
Writer/director Jacy Mairs doesn’t make the trailer park life look glamorous by any means in her exquisite feature debut, but in setting a coming-of-age tale there, she’s does find grace time and again as those around Stevie try to do their best by her even as they are largely consumed with difficult circumstances of their own. When people are hardened by their experience to keep their guard up, it is heartening to see a genuine friendship start to develop between Stevie, who has her whole life ahead of her, and Edie, who barely past high school looks as if she’s reached a dead end. The latter lusts after a beach life in California despite being not far from the coast herself in the Pacific Northwest, but that small distance in between seems to exist in every direction for her, making it easier to stay put and while she’s hardly changed, slamming down Pabst Blue Ribbons doesn’t look all that more advanced a form of entertainment than Stevie jumping on the trampoline next door with her brother’s friends, spraying them down with a hose, though to the 12-year-old’s eye, it looks like the mark of adulthood.
Yet Stevie isn’t entirely ready to be part of that world, and Mairs draws a compelling parallel between a part of society that is largely forgotten that the young woman is expected to grow up in and her looking for guidance when her mother is too busy keeping a roof over their head to be in her daughter’s life more, left adrift in two realms where spending time and energy searching for help can set one back even further. After catching the attention of the fickle generation just above her own around town when Edie starts to take her in, Stevie inevitably starts to feel more self-confident, but Mairs is careful to distinguish that from actual maturity and the film largely and wisely sidesteps a more well-worn path of the tween falling under the spell of bad influences to contemplate how she has to learn to have good judgment in a different way, bearing witness to a terrible event in which Edie is unconscious and it subsequently drives a wedge between their friendship when she can’t bear to tell her what happened while Edie remains in the dark about why they no longer speak.
There’s an instant credibility to “Trash Baby” when it is remarkably well-cast and the attention to detail in Nathan Pacyna’s production design makes Stevie’s home and the other places she frequents all show off their history in what’s piled up over the years. But the depth of that authenticity only continues to breathe life into the drama when it shows up in the nuance that Mairs brings to the story itself, avoiding any grim depiction of life on the margins when uncertainty about everything becomes internalized and people push through the best they can. Kevin Michaluk’s sun-kissed cinematography serves a dual purpose in keeping the mood light while also tapping into the feeling of a place where no one notices the passage of time, a quality that adequately papers over the film’s slight logical lapses in terms of what Stevie was and wasn’t conscious when she was younger, perhaps getting to know Edie better only now, but appearing to have no knowledge of her past whatsoever despite being less than 50 feet away. However, the comings and goings that may not register much amongst those living in destitution resonate strongly here and while the film captures a restless moment, it isn’t one an audience will want to leave.
“Trash Baby” does not yet have U.S. distribution. It will next screen as part of the Portland Panorama Film Festival on April 20th.