TRIXIE A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 2000 David N. Butterworth
** (out of ****)
It takes unenviable skill to squander the talents of Emily Watson, Dermot Mulroney, Nick Nolte, Nathan Lane, Will Patton, and Leslie Ann Warren, but Alan Rudolph--ironically known for being an actor's director--has done precisely that in his latest film, "Trixie."
Rudolph shouldn't take sole responsibility for this misfire, however. Any one member of this capable cast should have taken a look at his sorry script and realized it just wouldn't play in Peoria (or anywhere else for that matter). There's plenty of potential here, as there always is with a Rudolph story idea, but that potential got left in the dressing room, or on the cutting room floor, or in the mind of the man who hasn't hit artistic paydirt since 1988's "The Moderns."
Trixie (Watson) is an ineffective security guard with the darnedest Chicago accent. She takes a recuperative assignment in a lakeside casino after witnessing her partner stabbed by a shoplifter and quickly becomes involved with a stockpile of typical Rudolph oddballs. We've got a pushy ladykiller who hits on her (Mulroney, in the role Keith Carradine would have played ten years ago). We've got a smooth-talking lounge singer who befriends her (Lane, who escapes with most of his dignity intact). And we've got a pleasure boatload of multicolored miscreants--Nolte as a corrupt senator, Warren as a low-cut, washed-up diva, and Patton as...well, the boat owner.
Warren, who's been in a couple of Rudolph pictures, is the most underutilized of the impressive cast. As Dawn Sloane she acts tipsy and flaky on the boat, has a serious moment in a hotel room, and then she's outta there. Nolte's bent congressman borders on caricature, and Patton's Red Rafferty is simply undefined.
What makes Trixie's character interesting, supposedly, is her propensity to drop malapropisms at the drop of a bat, mangling metaphors and butchering the English language every time she opens her mouth. This is not a particularly original idea, of course, but Rudolph overwrites it as if he's just invented the palindrome. If you can think of Trixie's condition as a mental disease, a "Rain Man"-kind of syndrome, then you'll feel more sympathetic towards her character. But Trixie's constant abuse of familiar sayings and incessant frowning every time someone says anything the slightest bit contrary grow pat and predictable after about twenty minutes (and the film is a long--a very long--two hours).
Murdering free speech isn't Trixie's only annoying habit, however. If she's not chewing wads of gum then she's sucking on a sodapop straw. More often than not she's doing both.
There are hints of what Rudolph might have been attempting when Trixie waxes detective with Nolte's Senator Avery, Lane's Kirk Stans, and Mulroney's Dex Lang. Here the men's "straight" talk starts sounding not unlike Trixie's botched babblings--maybe she's not so crazy sounding after all? But before long Rudolph loses all perspective with several multiple endings and some out-of-leftfield zaniness in a restaurant kitchen that recalls a Three Stooges movie.
With "Trixie," Alan Rudolph is reveling in redundancy. Or, to quote his overwritten heroine, "flogging a dead horse until it's dead."
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@dca.net
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