Trusts and Estates (2013) Reviews

• Visually simple with crude dialogue and a nice ending, but a bit more context would have helped

  bob the moo2014-03-02

  This short film is a visually very simple scene where four lawyers are having a meal together one day in January 2011 in Santa Monica, California; their conversation was overheard by Jeanette Bonds, who decided to make this film of it. As a result the animation is very much secondary as the characters are hand sketched and basically line outlines which give us enough to get a sense of them as characters within this scene, but not so detailed as to distract us or give more than this needed. I say this because the origin and reason for the film is very much the dialogue, not the images and I was looking forward to this side of it. My assumption was that, as lawyers, the conversation would perhaps be morally shocking to me in terms of how they view their profession while also getting rich off it and indeed we start out that way, with a very short discussion over a badly handled situation over a woman's will. This engaged me but from there the dialogue became essentially just a long, horribly crude load of banter about each man claiming to have had sex with the young daughter of one of the other men while he in turn lambasts them over the size of their penises. As far as the discussion goes, I can understand why it struck Bonds because it is odd to hear grown men in professional jobs having the type of discussion one would expect from foul-mouthed and over-sugared children on Xbox Live, but the problem is that the film doesn't really give us an understanding of who these men are to then shock us with the contrast. The only time I felt that the point was well made was the punch-line which, if true, is just excellent for many reasons. For the most part though the film is just shockingly crude and unfunny, it still works as a moment in time and a record that people can be total idiots, have no self-awareness and have no idea how to conduct themselves in public because they only think about themselves, but it could have been done better and, while it is quite the conversation, it was not as impacting as I expected for a situation that inspired someone to make a film of it. The ending is a kicker though.