‘Sword of Trust’ a stab at sharp comedy drama
While not as sexually charged as Lynn Shelton’s “Humpday,” a 2009 mumblecore experiment in homosexual panic, director-co-writer Shelton’s improvbased “Sword of Trust” is an eerie snapshot of the topsyturvy, present day America.
Set in Birmingham, Ala., the film is split between two settings. One is a pawn shop that will be familiar to fans of cable TV’s unusually popular “Pawn Stars.” The shop is owned by the crusty Mel (crusty musician-comedian-podcaster Marc Maron), who inherited it from his family. In opening scenes, Mel’s young employee Nathaniel (Jon Bass) blathers on about “thinking out of the box,” which is this generation’s version of “I’m an uneducated idiot, but you have to respect my point of view.” Nathaniel believes the Earth is both flat and hollow, and he wears headphones and listens to podcasts, and he occasionally erupts in distracting, context-free laughter and/or anger.
During the day, Mel buys a guitar and a pair of boots and Mel’s ex Deidre (Shelton), a recovering/non-recovering junkie, pops in to try to pawn a ring. When we’re not at the shop, we meet lesbian couple Cynthia (Jillian Bell) and Mary (Michaela Watkins) as they arrive at Cynthia’s 98-yearold grandfather’s home after his death to learn that he has had a reverse mortgage to cover his expenses and the bank already owns the house. The good news is he has left Cynthia a potentially valuable Civil War sword with some problematic proof of authenticity and a letter written by him that is so addled by Alzheimer’s that they cannot understand it. They take the sword to Mel’s.
The remainder of the plot involves a group of people who believe the South did not lose the Civil War and that the sword will help them prove it and be extremely valuable to fellow believers. One of the strengths of “Sword of Trust” is that, as outlandish as it sounds, it also sounds right on the zeitgeist money.
Maron, who also supplies the film’s very tasty guitar-led blues score, brings his appealing brand of rebellious individualism and increasingly grizzled angry-young-man vibe. In supporting roles, Toby Huss (“Halt and Catch Fire”) is convincingly unhinged as someone after the sword. Newcomer Al Elliott is a natural as the gun-packing owner of a coffee shop next door to Mel’s shop. As the head of the Civil War unbelievers, Dan Bakkedahl (TV’s “Veep”) is almost as scary as Huss. But Shelton lights up the screen as Mel’s ex and makes you want to know more about their time in New York when he was in a band and they played at being the new Sid & Nancy.
(“Sword of Trust” contains the threat of gun violence and profanity.)