Scrap
Written and Directed by Vivian Kerr
Starring Vivian Kerr and Anthony Rapp
Unrated
Running Time: 1 hour and 45 minutes
Naples International Film Festival - Friday, October 27th, 2023 at 8:00pm and Saturday, October 28th, 2023 at 1:30pm (Naples, FL)

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

In my previous life as a music writer for my local alternative weekly, I learned that you cannot hold the local bands to the same standard as the touring band. Hence, anytime I wrote about an opener I didn’t care for (because it’s rude to ignore them entirely), I’d find myself writing about their “great energy” or “solid tunes” in an effort to make the whole segment as innocuous as possible. You can’t burn bridges and salt the earth when you’re one of the biggest boosters of the local music scene. So you grade on a curve, and honestly, that’s how it should be.

Filmmaking is similar. You don’t hold someone’s student film to the same standard as Spielberg. There are unwritten rules about that sort of thing. You can even extend that to someone’s low budget short or feature. Withholding the critic’s scalpel is a sign of respect. A sort of “good on you for actually making a thing.” True criticism, as in the times you run something through the shredder and scatter the debris to the four winds, is reserved for the stuff that is genuinely misanthropic and cynical. Something by Dinesh D’Souza, Brett Ratner, or Uwe Boll (only putting him on the list in the hopes that he challenges me to a boxing match. A boy can dream). The true vitriol is reserved for the stuff made in bad faith for capitalistic reasons.

So when you watch something like Scrap, the protocols kick in. It’s not great, but it’s also obvious that it is someone’s passion project and was made on a shoestring budget. It’s not like, egregiously bad for that category a la a Tommy Wiseau movie, but the movie’s vibe is that of an underbaked student film that managed to get a distribution deal. Scrap appears to be crowdfunded on a budget of $450k, and that writer/director/star/producer Vivian Kerr gets a just professional enough movie out of it while netting a legitimate well respected co-star in Anthony Rapp is a mini triumph.

The movie itself is less successful. Kerr stretches her short film of the same name to feature length without adding enough story to justify the expansion. Scrap follows a recently unemployed single mother (Kerr) as she desperately tries to get back on her feet while hiding her newfound homelessness from her brother (Rapp). It’s one of those character studies about a deeply flawed and unlikable protagonist. Those kinds of movies can work, but the trick is casting a charismatic enough lead to keep us engaged with the character. Scrap does not do that.

Kerr casts herself as this delusional, irresponsible, possibly mentally ill grifter woman who pawns her kid off onto her brother as she sleeps in her car and bluffs her way through job interviews. She’s an absolute mess, and Kerr just doesn’t have the chops to make this character the good kind of annoying. A lot of this comes down to Kerr’s script, which feels like it didn’t make it past the first draft. These little indie dramas, composed of by-the-numbers shot/reverse shot sequences, put so much focus on the dialogue that it really has to be great. No one has ever talked like the people in this movie, who talk like what a first time screenwriter thinks people talk like.

The dialogue is so stilted and occasionally cringe inducing (a character uses the phrase “mumbo jumbo,” and then references the usage later on) that even an experienced hand like Anthony Rapp can’t hang. The relationship between Kerr’s Beth and Rapp’s Ben is the emotional through line of the entire film, and there is such a lack of chemistry that the two feel like total strangers. Plus a whole tangential side plot about Ben and his wife being unable to have children that feels like the primary inclusion to goose the running time that comes off like a hamfisted version of the people who don’t want kids getting pregnant easily/people who want kids not being able to get pregnant trope and only distracts from the film’s main story.

Typically these movies where you have to spend most of the movie with a shitty person work because the value is in the payoff. You watch someone who is a mess cleaning things up, and that’s your three act structure in a nutshell. A lot of these do the thing where they just sort of flip a switch at the end and the character decides to start doing better, and unfortunately this is one of those.

Beth is an awful person until she all of a sudden isn’t with 10 minutes to go, and we end with her turning her life around. You can see it coming a mile a way, the way this movie leans on cliches, but there is no satisfaction in the resolution. It’s over and it’s like none of the story actually mattered. What was the point? What was the director trying to comment on? In the case of Scrap, I’m not quite sure. It mainly seems to be a vehicle to make this messy person into a wind-up toy who rips through the world tarnishing everything she touches, but at the end of the day this is just a 100 minute short film. A short film can get away with limited plot because it is essentially a style exercise. I could see Scrap the short working as a selling point for Kerr’s future directorial career, but a misfire like this only sets it back.