“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life.”
– Jean Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2, Episode 21 “Peak Performance.”
Everyone is one bad day away from homelessness. It’s not a matter of a moral or personal failing, it’s just sometimes how it happens. Despite what some would have you think regarding those who end up on the street, all it takes is a single medical emergency, one choice by an employer to reduce their staff, one whim of a CEO to switch to AI, and you’ve got yourself burning through your resources as you try to battle others with the same issues for the meager job postings available and the even fewer companies that actually fill the openings. You can do everything right and still fail and, sometimes, the only difference is what your resources look like (monetary and social). In her feature film directorial debut, writer/director/actor Vivian Kerr begins her family drama Scrap with such a situation, using it as a means to explore the fractured relationship of siblings and the importance of communication.
Vivian Kerr as Beth in SCRAP. Photo courtesy of Rue Dangeau.
Laid off from her company, Beth (Kerr) is now living out of her car while doing her best to keep up appearances as she job hunts. However, the search is harder than anticipated, which has meant leaving her daughter Birdy (Julianna Layne) with her brother Ben (Anthony Rapp) and his wife Stacy (Lana Parrilla) … a favor they didn’t mind doing at first, but the combination of Beth’s mistruths and their attempts at pregnancy via IVF is making attending to it all a bit much. Family matters a great deal to this set of siblings, yet the lack of communication between them is spilling over into other aspects of their lives that may prove to have significant consequences.
L-R: Khleo Thomas as Marcus and Vivian Kerr as Beth in SCRAP. Photo courtesy of Rue Dangeau.
Based on research, it appears that Kerr’s feature first released at the 2022 Deauville Film Festival in France before a few festival screenings in the United States in 2023 and is now coming available to view for a wider audience. Prior to the release, Kerr’s performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Superstore, New Girl, Castle, and plenty more, often in one-shot appearances, as well as written several shorts and eight episodes of the series We Are with the Band. Since Scrap’s initial release, Kerr has developed a new project, Séance, set for release later this year. The point, other than establishing her work in front of and behind the camera, is to illustrate the necessity to strive to create for oneself the opportunities one seeks in the entertainment industry. Individuals in the entertainment just want to work and would prefer consistency, something which this industry typically only offers to the supreme in demand, requiring all others to hustle, hustle, hustle, in order to stave off unemployment. This is not an easy path, either, as even the most established in the industry can have trouble developing new projects, which is why it’s important to remember that any released film is entirely a miracle, a representation of the determination by the creator and their crew to make their vision. In this case, Kerr developed Scrap the feature out of a 2018 short, seemingly using much of the same cast, even if with different character names. One presumes that, with this proof of concept, she was able to demonstrate the potential of the feature and, over the four years from release of the short to festival debut of the feature, hone the project into what audiences see now. In an era where creativity and art creation are viewed as commodities, as content that’s the result of technological divination and not human innovation, recognizing the correlation between Kerr’s own path and that of Beth’s is integral to understanding the emotional turmoil the character faces.
Under the current system if all people are viewed as workers, disposable at that, and working is all there is to define oneself by, why wouldn’t someone feel ashamed at the loss of work and, therefore, at the loss of their sense of value? Where Kerr has managed to find ways to elevate herself within an industry that chews up and spits out anything that dares enter it, Beth, too, is at a critical juncture wherein she must decide the ways in which she must bootstrap herself to success. The key here is that “bootstrap” in the way society uses it today differs from its actual meaning which is a literal impossibility. “Bootstrapping” is an act that one must do in order to pull themselves out of quicksand or some other danger, except there’s no way in which to lift oneself by one’s shoes; rather, in reality, we are each beholden to each other and it’s the only way that one can be saved in such a situation. Beth, however, as we meet her, is in full reality avoidance mode, rejecting help by obfuscating the truth so as not to appear a failure to those who care for her (her brother) either out of a socio-cultural fear of being perceived as morally devoid or, more specifically, as someone who needs caring for by the person who she recognizes as more of a parental figure than sibling. Within the first 30 minutes, Kerr deftly sets up the complexity of what it means to be unemployed and living in a car, the perseverance required to maintain a social norm, and the crippling sense of disappointment that arises when one’s self-worth is tied to what they can afford, an element made all the more powerful with the realization that Beth is a single mom whose daughter is staying with her Uncle Ben under the guise of Beth being on a business trip. Thus, Kerr injects an additional emotional layer as Beth contends not just with her own perceived self-worth as an unemployed person who cannot seem to get hired anywhere, being a younger sibling desperate to avoid asking her brother for help, and what it means to be a good parent. This makes the following 75 minutes a powder keg that will either explode or be defused at the last moment. Like all dramas, only time will tell.
Through some nice interweaving of flashbacks and natural dialogue between siblings, the audience learns a great deal about the siblings, specifically that they lost their parents at a young age and that Ben essentially raised Beth. This matters in the sense that Ben, despite their equal footing as children, was made to step up in a way that he shouldn’t have had to at a young age, therefore Beth’s lies and poor communication aren’t just the typical “sibling fuck-up” trope, but are loaded with the extra tinge of faux-parental rebellion. Kerr’s choices here insert a great deal of subtext to the conversations that take place between Ben and Stacey as they deal with their own fertility issues, his reactions being of someone who deals with chaos by asserting control however he can be they binders full of research or paying for things where his family cannot. It’s demonstrative of someone who never quite dealt with the unfair responsibility he was meant to shoulder and that it’s not necessarily a good trait in abundance, especially when Stacey needs more than a binder to deal with her complex emotions surrounding pregnancy. With each new detail, Kerr weaves a complex interpersonal dynamic that, yes, could be resolved so much more easily if Beth merely told her brother what was going on, but, that’s not possible, certainly not in the beginning, given the various barriers in place (self-imposed as well as social) that go beyond the fictional narrative Kerr’s created. We, as the audience, feel the distance between Beth and Ben almost immediately via the delicate performance from Rapp (Dazed and Confused; Rent) and push-pull performance from Kerr which places the two in an awkward dance of wanting to be close but are kept apart by expectation and presumption. Even when Scrap never quite reaches the heaviness one might expect from a story with such a narrative, these two keep the audience engaged as the actors convey the journey from what sibling-strangers tied together by the past have versus the kind of intimacy only siblings can have. The best parts of the film are when the two drop pretense and just engage each other as people, seeking to bring out the best in the other without passive-aggression or a reductive word.
L-R: Anthony Rapp as Ben and Vivian Kerr as Beth in SCRAP. Photo courtesy of Rue Dangeau.
One thing to be aware is that, for all intents and purposes, the plot line of parenthood doesn’t operate the way one expects based on other films in which there’s a financially struggling single mother juxtaposed with a financially successful individual struggling to get pregnant. What this means in brief is that Birdy is less of a character in the story and more of a prop, something which Beth and Ben (and Stacey) interact with and talk about, but isn’t formed of her own actions or choices. To that, this isn’t Birdy’s story, no matter how much audiences might want it to be otherwise, yet she’s nevertheless still intrinsically linked to Beth’s dilemma and self-identity. Especially as we learn about Beth as a child in relation to her sibling, we come to understand that Birdy is a representation of Beth’s sorrow at her perception of herself in light of her inability to obtain a job and, therefore, housing. There’s a lot that Kerr somewhat skips over in favor of focusing on the family dynamic (like how much money Beth has, the impact of using shopping as a psychological salve, and many other smaller choices to color the character) and wraps a little too quickly when approaching the conclusion, but, ultimately, the film keeps audiences engaged by avoiding missteps of over-dramatization and rooting the film in a realistic set of problems that could, more or less, be resolved through clear communication and honesty.
Vivian Kerr as Beth in SCRAP. Photo courtesy of Rue Dangeau.
Not everything about the film does work in its totality. It’s a little too quick to dismiss (via dialogue from Beth) the fact that some people actually do require binders of information and data to get pregnant (thereby potentially and unintentionally implying that pregnancy should be easy) versus allowing nature to take its course. It never challenges Beth or holds her accountable as a mother and sibling for the abuses she gives out, though it does explain them to the audience and not wholly to the characters involved. It’s an extremely messy film, but it’s an honest mess that does capture the difficulty of doing the right thing in terrible circumstances when all around you it feels like you’ve failed where so easily others succeed, where one can become so rooted in the mentality of “other people have it worse” or “why can’t people see my problems without me telling them” to forget the power of communication to foster the community that would uplift you. Especially when you do everything right and still fail — a casualty of circumstances and not personal fault or moral failing — community is what you need to survive. If nothing else, Scrap conveys this will absolute clarity.
Available on VOD and digital December 13th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official Scrap website.
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.
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