F

There was a brief period in the mid-1990s when it appeared that
Alan Rudolph might finally have escaped the pattern of making
movies that had some element of interest to them but were
overall conspicuous failures: “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious
Circle” (1994) was too arch for its own good, but at least it
gave Jennifer Jason Leigh a chance to shine, and “Afterglow”
(1997) was a sensitive, intelligent piece graced by superior
performances by Julie Christie and Nick Nolte. But recently
Robert Altman’s aging protege has slipped into the cinematic
abyss. Last year’s execrable “Breakfast of Champions” was a
disaster of the first magnitude, quite probably his worst
feature ever, and this followup, while hardly as awful as that,
is nonetheless a shambling, annoying mess.

“Trixie” is a misguided attempt to put a 1940s-style screwball
heroine into a modern-day version of a convoluted film noir.
The title character, a security guard with a habit of talking
in garbled cliches, is played gratingly by Emily Watson;
feeling unappreciated in the big city, she takes a job at a
resort casino, where she’s supposed to eye out pickpockets and
the like. She becomes romantically linked with clumsy but
purportedly beguiling hoodlum Dex Lang (Dermot Mulroney–the
character’s forename, as with so much in the picture, is meant
to be ironic, since the fellow’s anything but dexterous); and
that in turn drags her into a labyrinthine, incomprehensible
plot involving Dex’s boss Red (Will Patton), a shady local
contractor; a boozy singer (Lesley Ann Warren); an underage
vamp (Brittany Murphy); a friendly lounge singer (Nathan Lane);
and a corrupt, voluble politician (Nick Nolte).

As scripted by Rudolph, the picture is meant to be both larkish
and intriguing, but it’s neither. For a piece which is
obviously intended to use language as a metaphor for false
appearances (the glibness of Nolte’s senator is contrasted
with Trixie’s nonsensical gibberish in one grotesquely extended
conversation), it’s astonishingly badly written. The endless
stream of malapropisms that cascade from the heroine’s mouth
might initially be amusing, but as they pile up they rival the
number of goofy non-sequiturs mouthed by Bullwinkle in his new
animated film, and before too long one is groaning at the very
thought of hearing another. But if the comedy doesn’t work,
the noirish elements are even worse. One couldn’t possibly
comprehend, let alone care about, the machinations of the tale’s
villains, and when a final revelation emerges, it’s so far
out of left field as to be calamitously unfair.

A line-up of talented performers try desperately to enliven
the dreary material, but their efforts are like CPR on a long-
dead corpse. Watson plays the heroine with a sharpness that’s
intended to be amusing but quickly grows irritating, Mulroney
proves a cipher, Warren and Murphy overplay horriby, and
Patton fumes to no appreciable effect. Lane is once again
unable to tone down his shtick to cinematic terms; maybe
he should stick to the stage, where one can watch him from
forty or fifty rows back. Saddest of all, however, is
Nolte. He remains an actor capable of fine work (as shown not
only by “Afterglow” but by Paul Schrader’s remarkable “Affliction”),
but here (as in “Breakfast”) Rudolph encourages him to go over
the top, and the result is lamentable, embarrassing, and–in
one scene with Murphy–positively revolting.

As director, Rudolph’s technique is, as usual, rather too loose
and ragged to make much of a positive impression. When he
does try to showcase his artifice–most notably in a scene
between Watson and Warren in which the two are photographed
in a carefully-arranged sequence of mirrors–the effect is
much too obviously contrived, and pointless besides. For the
most, however, Rudolph eschews such tricks in the apparent
belief that his script can carry the day without being pumped
up by virtuoso camerawork or staging. As a result his picture
is not merely flat and incomprehensible, but drab as well.

The advertising tagline to “Trixie” is that its protagonist
murders the English language. The copy-writer doesn’t go far
enough, though; she’s murder on the audience, too.