The Confederacy lost the American Civil War, of course – a quick Google will tell you that. But we live in a time of “alternative facts”, and while all of us are sadly acquainted with nonsense like Holocaust denial and the notion that the last U.S. Presidential election was rigged, this kind of spurious belief can be found everywhere – including, it seems, the Civil War.
This is the starting point for Lynn Shelton’s 2019 comedy Sword of Trust. After the death of her grandfather, Cynthia (Jillian Bell) and her partner Mary (Michaela Watkins) learn that they will not be inheriting his house as expected, but he has left them a 19th century military sabre which, through a long and spurious loop of logic, seems to imply that the Confederacy had actually won the war. How that makes any kind of sense is beside the point; what matters is that Civil War Truthers are a thing, and that means there’s a market for artefacts that support their beliefs.
Which is how Mel (Marc Maron), the proprietor of a rundown Alabama pawn shop, is roped in. Mel, being Jewish, has no truck with white supremacists, but he’s plugged into the dubious antiquities market and so, along with his gormless, conspiracy-obsessed employee, Nathaniel (Jon Bass), he helps facilitate a meet up between the couple and a coterie of backwoods “the South Will Rise Again” types.
All this sounds like a good set-up for a lacerating satire of revisionist history and wilful ignorance and, to be fair, those elements are in play here, but Sword of Trust is written and directed by exponent Lynn Shelton, and her focus has always been on the personal. Indeed, Sword of Trust turned out to be Shelton’s final film, as she passed away from an undiagnosed blood disorder in 2020. In that light, it’s tempting to view the film as a kind of thesis statement, albeit unintentional, on her body of work.
Shelton’s films have always been about relationships. Perhaps that sound trite – every story is about relationships, right? However, Shelton excelled at digging into the thorny, contradictory nature of personal interactions, be they close friendships or even more intimate.
Inheriting a sword rather than a house leads to a spot of bother in Lynn Shelton’s ‘Sword of Trust’. Source: Forager Films
Her breakthrough film, Humpday (2009), involved two straight friends, Ben (Mark Duplass) and Andrew (Joshua Leonard), who dare each other to perform together in a gay pornographic film, forcing them to examine their sexuality and the nature of their relationship.
Your Sister’s Sister (2011) sees Duplass again as a man mourning the death of his brother who, in love with his brother’s ex-girlfriend (Emily Blunt), nonetheless sleeps with her sister (Rosemarie DeWitt), who is gay.
Sword of Trust, by contrast, starts out as a kind of comedic caper before canting into relationship territory. Only this time it’s not just our relationships with each other that Shelton is talking about, but our relationship with truth and how that informs the way we connect with people. At one point Cynthia has to decide what she chooses to believe about her late grandfather and how she will remember him – as a racist conspiracy theorist or as the kind and warm-hearted patriarch of her childhood.
The heart of the film is a single monologue from Maron, delivered seemingly out of the blue, where he details his past as a drug addict and the ongoing story of his connection with his ex-girlfriend Deirdre (Shelton herself), who is still struggling with substance abuse. It’s a perfect, poignant bit of business, made all the more so by the knowledge that Maron and Shelton were in a relationship at the time of filming, and at the time of her death.
But that metatextual element is not vital to our understanding of Sword of Trust, although it colours it a little. This is a perfectly formed, drily witty, indie comedy that uses an outrageous situation to highlight some essential truths – and necessary falsehoods – about how we live with and love each other. That’s what Lynn Shelton was best at, and it is a damn shame we won’t be getting any more gems like this.
Sword of Trust is now streaming at SBS On Demand:
