When Jose Angelo is caught by the Police who have been chasing him through his working class apartment building in a Rio de Janiero suburb. he manages to throw a wallet that he has been grasping over an outside wall and it lands in the back of a passing garbage truck. Whilst the police are beating the living daylights out of Angelo as he refuses to talk to them about the wallet’s contents, it actually ends up at the Municipal Trash dump where it is quickly discovered by Raphael, one of the scruffy young boys who spend their days sorting through all the trash.

Raphael splits the cash with Gando his best friend but when the Police turn up offering a hefty reward for the wallet’s return they realize that it must contain something much more important than money. They seek advice from another more worldly boy called Rato who lives in the nearby sewers and he tells them that the key that was part of the contents will open a locker at the Railway station downtown.  That leads them to a letter with some code on it, and so they head back to the favela to sneak a peek on the local priest’s laptop to see if that will help them try and decipher what this all means.

Father Julliard is one of those ex-pats full of good intentions (and a lot of alcohol too) that landed there years ago to help and minister to the locals in the favela, but is now a little too jaded to do any real good.  He tells Olivia another American who has just arrived full of energy and enthusiasm to teach the boys “don’t waste your life fighting battles that make you bitter or make you dead.”

When  Raphael and Gando fail to show up for work at the Dump next day a very suspicious Police Inspector hunts them down, and this time its Raphael who is almost beaten to death.   Instead of being scared off by this experience, it actually increases his determination to get to the bottom of the matter.  He had overheard the cops talk about a powerful businessman who is running for Mayor, so armed with this information, the boys persuade Olivia to take Gando to meet the person who the letter is addressed to, who happens to be in prison.

They learn from Clemente the prisoner that the code works in conjunction with a Bible he has, and after the boys bribe a Prison Guard to get this, they are on the way to solve the mystery that Angelo had lost his life protecting.  The fact that these 14 year near illiterate street boys could crack the code is more than a tad far fetched but as that scene follows an exhilarating chase through the back alleys of the favela, we allow this rather big stretch of the imagination. This is after all Hollywood’s take on Brazil and not the ‘real thing’.

The boys track down the missing millions Angelo had ‘retrieved’ from his corrupt boss, the mayoral candidate, plus the detailed ledger of all the corporations who have given him these massive bribes over the years.  They even finally get the better of the sadistic Police Inspector who has been on their heels every step of the way, to give this fast paced and very entertaining movie, an unexpected happy ever after finale.

Trash is written by Oscar nominated Brit screenwriter Richard Curtis (‘Four Weddings and A Funeral’), and directed by fellow Brit and Triple Oscar Nominated Stephen Daldry.  It is also Daldry’s fourth movie starring teenage boys (‘Billy Elliot’, ‘The Reader’ and ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’) and it is the electric performance of the kids that make this drama so very compelling. So much so that Daldry very generously gives the boys acting coach Christian Duurvoort a credit as his co-director.   The adults in the movie that play second fiddle to the boys are Brazilian superstar Wagner Moura as Angelo, Martin Sheen as Father Julliard and Rooney Mara as Olivia.

Despite its very Hollywood & European provenance this ‘Brazilian’ underdogs-beating-the-system tale has an authentic enough feel to tug at heart strings just like in ‘Slumdog Millionaire’.  When a naive Olivia inquires why the boys stuck with it all, the answer is simple. It was because it was the right thing to do.

BTW, lest you should worry about some of the working conditions on the actors working in these slums are as atrocious as they looked, the production team had  2,000 cubic meters of “clean trash”  lugged in to recreate the Dump!