Thick-tongued and tedious

Tiresome 'Trixie' cannot survive on malapropisms alone

July 6, 2000
Web posted at: 4:01 p.m. EDT (2001 GMT)

By Paul Tatara
CNN.com Reviewer

(CNN) -- It's easy to pigeonhole Alan Rudolph as a consistently less-focused student of Robert Altman's slowly coalescing cinematic essays. Rudolph, after all, broke into the industry as an assistant on Altman's films, and Altman has produced several of Rudolph's distinctly oddball movies.

But even the master's degree of success wavers from picture to picture. It's the nature of the loose-limbed mis-en-scene that Altman invented, operating as it does on hazy, overlapping dialogue and deceptively blase construction.

You shouldn't forget, though, that Altman, even with his numerous catastrophic misfires, is responsible for a handful of extraordinary movies that stand as defining moments of post-1960s commercial filmmaking. Every now and then, his off-the-wall technique is touched with true, cantankerous genius.

No Altman here

Not so with Rudolph. His latest blabbering contraption, a self-consciously "quirky" detective story called "Trixie," is downright awful. Its glaring lack of propulsion gets aggravating before the end of the first act, and the characters are written as if they aren't written at all.

The only thing that seems thought-out is the agonizing, malapropism-choked dialogue that Rudolph's usually formidable leading lady, Emily Watson, is forced to deliver. Rudolph receives sole credit for it, but the script sounds like it was written in conjunction with Yogi Berra and Norm Crosby.

Watson plays Trixie, a self-educated security guard who gets assigned to an undercover job at a casino. She's extremely focused on her work, even though her pseudo-command of the English language gives her the air of an overachieving mental patient.

It's encouraging to see Watson relax a little bit. Her performances in "Breaking the Waves" (1996) and "Hilary and Jackie" (1998) are highly reminiscent of early Robert DeNiro. As brilliant as she is, she's so intense you think she's forever on the verge of a cerebral hemorrhage. Her great strength is that she's capable of utilizing that cerebellum in an occupation that mostly rewards actresses for shaking their butts and looking the other way.

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Regrettably, "Trixie" deserves a maladroit butt-shaker in the title role. The disorganized quality that makes or breaks Altman's films smashes this one to smithereens.

A murder, a muddle

Trixie eventually uncovers a murder mystery of sorts, but Rudolph is far more concerned with parading kooky characters than he is with building any suspense. People just float through scenes, deliver a handful of bizarre lines, then disappear for 20 minutes at a time.

Nathan Lane is an insincere, ex-con lounge singer who dispenses wisdom like an inelegant Yoda. Dermot Mulroney (forever to be confused with D.B. Sweeney) plays Dex Lang, a womanizer who's looking to bed the dangerously child-like Trixie. He drives a small tour boat for Red Rafferty (Will Patton), a vicious construction mogul who has equally vicious friends in high places.

One of those friends is Sen. Avery (Nick Nolte), a bombastic airbag who speaks in curlicue phrases that sound like an insane, ongoing campaign speech. Press releases claim that every word Nolte utters was originally spoken by real-life politicians, but who cares? Instead of writing a character who seems like a living, breathing person, Rudolph concocts an instrument of sarcasm that does nothing to stabilize an already foundering story.

God knows there's nothing wrong with mocking insincerity, especially since our country feeds on it like a massive pack of wild boars. But disdain for insincerity works better when you're actually being sincere yourself, a stance that's clearly beyond Rudolph's wiseacre reach.

Trixie discovers that Sen. Avery may be involved in the murder of a dim-witted floozy (Lesley Ann Warren, generating the only sympathy in the entire film) who was present at a little get-together out on Red's boat. This gives Watson reason to lob absurd malapropisms like so many heads of rotten cabbage while she tries to find the killer.

Killing the language

Trixie's verbal shenanigans get so tiresome after the first five minutes of the film that they overwhelm everything else in their all-encompassing path.

It's not that Watson occasionally drops a confused cliche to add some strained mirth to the proceedings; literally 80 percent of what comes out her mouth is a studied, apparently hilarious twist on an overused phrase. They just keep pouring out of her, one after another. "It's time to fish or get off the pot." "You can't just sit there like a sore thumb." "You gotta grab the bull by the tail and look it in the eye." "That guy smokes like a fish." "Why do people always have to beat a dead horse to death?" "You're a Jekyll of all trades." It doesn't take long to realize that the wrong character has been tossed out of a window.

Watson needs to get herself cast in a Coen brothers movie if she feels the need to be wacky. Rudolph, on the other hand, should finally try to develop his own set of fingerprints -- you know, since Robert Altman's are already taken.

There's the usual spray of profanity in "Trixie," some rather severe violence, and a couple of sexual situations. It may not be the worst movie so far this year (lots of stiff competition in that department), but it's easily the most obnoxious. Rated R. 117 laborious minutes.

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Trixie

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