A home invasion robbery drama set within a diamond broker’s architectural gem, Trespass is rough-cut paste.
Bombing around in a Porsche barking out deals via cellphone, Kyle Miller (Nicolas Cage) has in truth fallen upon a cratered jewel market and is just another “middle man living on credit.” The white mansion with a pool seamlessly joined to the lakeshore designed by his unfulfilled wife Sarah (Nicole Kidman, practically still Stepford) stands as an unfinished monument to American insolvency and excess—and, it would turn out, a more apt metaphor for a movie under construction.
Petulant teen daughter Avery (Liana Liberato) argues about party restrictions then retreats to her conspicuously lockable bedroom, the first of the movie’s teeming red herrings. She sneaks off to the party, defeating her paranoid father’s high-tech alarm system by jumping the garden-variety chain-link fence in the backyard. The invaders, one of whom installed the alarm, never discover that weakness in the Millers’ defense, nor should they bother: They come to the front door dressed as unidentified sheriffs on vague business—all the easier since the security cameras only show faceless, chest-level close-ups—and the Millers just let them in. Let the torturous “truth telling” begin.
Despite her apparent susceptibility to peer pressure, Avery leaves the party unimpressed by the advances of a teen playboy flashing an open safe full of prescription drugs and tall piles of cash. At that point, viewers should be popping a Homer Simpson-like thought bubble: “It’s true: The rich are just as corrupt as us!” But Avery returns home, not to mount a rescue of her parents from the outside in but only to be instantly captured and used as leverage against her parents, as if she’d never left.
Kyle tries to talk the burglars into a deal. They know less about fencing stolen rocks than Kyle, who’s been replacing his wife’s jewels with fakes to keep up appearances. He confesses failure but guesses they plan to murder him no matter what he does so holds fast to his illusions.
Karl Gajdusek’s screenplay rather too obviously makes the heart of the group of invaders a set of Bible-named brothers, Elias and Jonah (Cam Gigandet and Ben Mendelsohn), themselves captive to tweaker girlfriends and dissembling drug cronies, to make the tired point of love undercut by deception and fungible loyalty—the dysfunctional family that preys together stays together, but only for so long.
In flashbacks that play more like the parody of the Mexican gardener’s seduction in The Man with Two Brains than the subtle undercurrents revealed in the brilliant acting of Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear, Elias emerges from the pool, dragon-tattooed biceps dripping, and tries to win Sarah with his unimaginative porn posing. After that’s revealed as a lie, it’s only a matter of time before the gang turns on itself, as gangs have throughout movie history.
Abandoning the clarity of immoral clash in Phone Booth (2002), director Joel Schumacher seems as influenced by a smattering of paranoid imperiled-people pics (following David Fincher’s Panic Room) as by television series such as 24, with its wearying cycles of capture/torture/escape/recapture. The story lapses and loose ends eventually discourage viewers from caring whether they come from careless plotting or deliberate misdirection.
Schumacher also borrows some of the least appealing gestalt from German filmmaker Michael Haneke’s malevolent piece about Leopold and Loeb-like thrill-killers Funny Games and his surveillance-blackmail mystery Caché. Schumacher shows less misanthropy than Haneke’s sangfroid and tries to be sympathetic to both sides of this class clash, but his flowers to the distant, chilly nouveau riche hustlers seem plastic.
In Hollywood cant, the Millers should be ripe for shaking down by lowlifes who value money as much as they do. But in the end, the movie seems more interested in stringing you along than making a point.
