Midway through Scrap, writer/director Vivian Kerr's feature expansion of her 2018 short of the same name, the film's anti-heroine Beth (played by the director) drags her long-suffering brother Ben (Anthony Rapp) back to the ice rink they frequented as kids. As Ben stumbles and falls, Beth glides gracefully across the ice, closing her eyes and savouring the moment. We suspect Beth has dual motivations for bringing her brother to the rink: she wants to recapture their childhood connection, but she also wants to see him flounder while she succeeds, as in every other aspect of their lives Beth is a trainwreck while Ben has it all, at least in his sister's eyes, with a successful career as a fantasy novelist.
Before that key moment we're introduced to Beth as she wakes up in her car, which has become her home since losing her account executive job due to downsizing. While Beth searches for a new job, her young daughter Birdy (Julianna Layne) is being looked after by Ben and his wife Stacy (Lana Parrilla), who believe Beth is out of town on a work assignment. When Beth hits rock bottom she swallows her pride and convinces Ben and Stacy to let her stay in their home under the pretence that she is moving house and her belongings are temporarily in storage.
Dramas about messy protagonists reconnecting with their more solid siblings are something of a staple of American indie cinema, with Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me undoubtedly the best of the bunch. At first glance, Scrap may not appear to offer much of a variation on the theme, and might be crudely dismissed as falling somewhere between Lonergan and Amy Schumer. But Kerr's film quietly reveals its depth as it unspools a vital tale of self-acceptance and reinvention.
By odd coincidence I watched Kerr's debut just after viewing The Girl with the Needle, Magnus von Horn's excellent but intensely grim serial killer drama, as Scrap looked like the sort of peppy indie dramedy that would cheer me up. While one is a monochromatic misery fest set in the bleak ruins of post-war Denmark and the other is set in sunny modern day Los Angeles, both films share the same core storyline of a woman whose mind is so clouded by social climbing that she fails to accept just just how far down the ladder she really is. Both films are ultimately about reaching that point in life where you have to face the brutal reality that your dreams will remain just that and make peace with the cards you've been dealt.
Unlike the protagonist of von Horn's melodrama, Beth doesn't become an accomplice to murder, but Kerr dares to make Beth a difficult protagonist to get behind, especially in her treatment of her daughter, who has become sadly accustomed to her mother not being around for some of the key moments of her life. Waking up after a drunken reconnection with her abusive former boyfriend and Birdy's absent father Joshua (Brad Schmidt), Beth misses out on her daughter's ballet recital, and it's left to Ben and Stacy to remember Birdy's birthday. Despite all this, only the coldest viewer would fail to empathise with Beth, especially in the context of her troubled past with Joshua. Commendably, Kerr never demands that we take Beth's side, or to even sympathise with her, and even when Beth claims to have finally gotten her shit together we suspect she's just one mistake away from another collapse.
Beth's largely self-inflicted troubles are contrasted with Ben and Stacy's ongoing struggles to conceive through IVF treatment. Seeing Beth take being a mother for granted riles up Stacy, who spends much of the movie in a passive aggressive state towards her unwanted house guest. In a more obvious version of this story Stacy might be painted as a villainess, but Kerr's take is far more nuanced and we understand Stacy's frustrations.
Not so nuanced is a subplot concerning Ben's desire to ditch fantasy writing in favour of his pet project Billie Holiday biography. When his publisher insists that the last thing we need is another Billie Holiday biography ("by a white guy"), it's hard to disagree. The movie's reductive depiction of fantasy literature fans as a tribe of socially maladjusted weirdoes is at odds with its overall thesis of seeing below the surface of people. More well-rendered is Ben's struggle to balance his support for both his wife and his sister, and Rapp brilliantly portrays the stress welling up inside him.
As Beth comes to terms with the cold realisation that she may have to give up her career aspirations, she begins to embrace the working class world she once grew up in, taking a retail job and dating Marcus (Khleo Thomas), an employee of the aforementioned ice rink. The lack of agency given to Marcus unfortunately sees the film skate close to becoming somewhat patronising in its depiction of the world of the minimum wage. It's a shame Kerr deploys her supporting characters largely as human props, as in Beth, Ben and Stacy she has created three of the most human and relatable leads you could hope to find.
Directed by: Vivian Kerr
Starring: Vivian Kerr, Anthony Rapp, Lana Parrilla, Beth Dover, Khleo Thomas
