TV and music video director Adam Smith makes his feature debut with Trespass Against Us, a scraggly, uneven British crime movie about a family of criminals on the verge of coming undone. The title is both a reference to the Lord’s Prayer and to those who dare to challenge the trailer park-dwelling Cutler family, part of the Irish-gypsy criminal underworld depicted in films like Guy Richie’s Snatch. Rather than commingle with other families in the network, the Cutlers rarely venture far from their countryside compound, funding their nomadic lifestyle by robbing nearby mansions and committing other relatively small-scale operations. Like the HBO drama The Sopranos, Trespass Against Us examines the commonalities between the nuclear family and the criminal family and the toxic erosion that occurs when the two get too close. But where The Sopranos utilized melodrama, Trespass Against Us has the airy, blasé nature of a dry comedy, and Smith struggles with striking the proper tone.
Colby (Brendan Gleeson, doing strong work) is the Cutler patriarch, and he follows a self-made Christian belief system that puts a flimsy moral surface over his brutish criminal code. As a performer, Gleeson is naturally intimidating. He’s hulking, lurking and capable of menace. Colby’s the same way, but as potentially dangerous as he is, he also exudes a backwoods virtue. He thinks the world is flat and that evolution is a lie, because that’s what his dear old dad told him. Even his criminal enterprises have a good-old-boy innocence, seen in the many sequences of off-road vehicular shenanigans designed to do little more than irritate local police, Dukes of Hazard-style. Chad (Michael Fassbenber), Colby’s illiterate oldest son and heir apparent, enjoys these manic pursuits as much as anyone. But now that his kids are getting older, he wants them to have the opportunities—namely, an education—that he didn’t, throwing a wrench into Colby’s plans as well as his vision of how his family and the world at large should operate.
Throughout the film, you’re likely to be reminded of American “indie” comedies like Juno and Little Miss Sunshine. Smith’s central conceit with Trespass Against Us is to turn a hardened crime drama into something lighter and more endearing, placing a layer of quirky affects over gritty gangster material. Such an approach comes at the expense of mood and feeling. The movie often feels less dangerous than it should and more sentimental than it realizes. The narrative stakes rarely feel crucial, and attempts at humor are mostly stilted and inert. As our view into the Cutler clan, Chad is pitched somewhere between a loyal family soldier and a befuddled black sheep, and Fassbender’s performance alternates between tough-guy posturing and impish comic relief. He’s good here, but he also seems to be working too hard. And the strain is evident throughout. The film’s tonal shifts occur with such recklessness that things like characterization and theme are tossed to the side, heightening the film’s weird, mutinous energy that’s occasionally charming but mostly just exhausting.
More than a consistent thematic and stylistic trajectory, though, what Trespass Against Us lacks most is authenticity. Screenwriter Alastair Siddons modeled the film’s script on a real-life family of outlaw squatters living on the outskirts of England’s Cotswolds region, and he clearly picked up on their thick, unintelligible brogue and unique modes of conversation. (This is one of those rare English-language films that requires subtitles.) But the characters lack any detail not supplied by the cast of capable actors, and the story feels culled from an array of kitchen-sink dramas and dysfunctional family comedies rather than first-hand experience. Without any kind of sociological credibility or characters capable of relating to or caring about, Trespass Against Us ultimately stands as a flailing genre piece that isn’t even sure to which genre it belongs.
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