USA,
2000, 117 min
Shown in 2000
CREDITS
- dir
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Alan Rudolph
- prod
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Robert Altman
- scr
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Alan Rudolph
- cam
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Jan Kiesser
- editor
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Michael Ruscio
- cast
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Emily Watson, Dermot Mulroney, Nick Nolte, Nathan Lane, Brittany Murphy, Lesley Ann Warren
- source
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Sony Pictures Classics, 550 Madison Ave., 8th fl., New York, NY 10022. FAX: 212-833-8844
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COMMENTS
Zoom! Gala screening. Dermot Mulroney in person.
OTHER
A delightful pastiche of mystery and conspiracy thriller genres, Trixie is a characteristic topsy-turvy piece from veteran indie filmmaker Alan Rudolph, full of his customary inversions and visual mischief. Emily Watson plays the title character, a plucky, lonesome private investigator with a hilarious relationship to the English language who comes to a northwestern resort town to provide security for a casino. Encountering a typical gallery of Rudolph eccentrics—a jaded, booze-soaked lounge singer (Nathan Lane), an inept lothario (Dermot Mulroney) and a boorish real estate tycoon (Will Patton)—she’s soon drawn into a web of crime and cover-up that leads all the way up to a lecherous, cant-spouting senator (Nick Nolte, pulling out all the comic stops as only he can). As ever with Rudolph, the genre elements (sex scandal, blackmail, murder, shady real estate deals) remain notional, indefinite, teetering on the verge of abstraction, and his heroine’s richly comic malapropisms make a mockery of the hard-boiled dialogue and situations. But the deft, idiosyncratic mix of sentimentality, irony, burlesque and verbal and visual mischief harbors a wry critique of the Clinton era’s debased civics and incoherent politics, where everybody is on the make and has sex on the brain. It’s all brought off with such consummate ease that Rudolph’s modernism is starting to look classical.
—Gavin Smith
FACTOID #28
A print of Tonight and Every Night, to be shown at the Rita Hayworth tribute in 1972, was stolen out of a truck on its way to the theater.
