Sword of Trust (Lynn Shelton, 2019) (Patreon)

I can't speak with any real authority about Lynn Shelton as a director. I wasn't as impressed with her breakout Humpday (2009) as some others were, although I thought the follow-up, Your Sister's Sister (2011) was a very sharp chamber drama that took a potentially crass, sensationalist premise and afforded it a significant degree of dignity while still allowing the essential foibles of the three protagonists to bubble up into dark comedic territory. After that Shelton pretty much fell off my radar.

But I liked Sword of Trust. More a thought experiment than a "movie" in the conventional sense, it sets up a premise that, while asinine, has several toes firmly planted in our equally asinine current reality. Given the proliferation of conspiracy theories and the plentiful dolts who choose to believe in them, what would happen if there were a "conspiracy MacGuffin," a "prover object" that ostensibly offered tangible evidence that the earth was flat, that the moon landing was staged, or (in this case), that the South had actually won the Civil War?

Shelton uses this framework for an admittedly skeletal plot, but that's really just there to provide her performers room to riff on various levels of belief and trust, from the global (said conspiracies) to the intensely personal (love affairs gone right or wrong). The heart of the film takes place between locations, in the back of a moving van, where the four principals talk about how they met. The married couple, Mary (Michaela Watkins) and Cynthia (Jillian Bell) expose the volatile yet functional dynamics of their relationship. Pawn shop employee Nathaniel (Jon Bass) demonstrates his absolute Gumpism, having landed his "career" simply by refusing not to be somewhere. And most affecting of all, Mel (Marc Maron) tells his tale of shattered dreams and living amongst the shards.

The conclusion is a bit of a rush job. Kingpin (Dan Bakkedahl) makes a heel-to-face turn that seems both spontaneous, like an improv decision that Shelton and company were forced to go "yes, and..." to, and a convenient way to bring the film to a close. But maybe this is appropriate for a film that's about a scam that the scammers decide isn't worth the hassle.