Trixie
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Alan Rudolph’s previous feature, Breakfast of Champions (1999), probably his best since Choose Me (1984), is an abrasive, angry, formally imaginative, and generally faithful adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s book of the same name. It has a lot going for it, including Bruce Willis, who helped finance it, as a blustering car dealer, one of his best performances to date; Barbara Hershey as his pill-popping wife; Nick Nolte as his sales manager and best friend, who guiltily harbors a fetish for lingerie; and Albert Finney as Vonnegut’s dark doppelganger, itinerant hack SF writer Kilgore Trout. It was easily last year’s most corrosive Hollywood movie about the American way of life, and it was especially good at showing the claustrophobic desperation of living in a small midwestern town and slowly going insane–a potent literary theme at least since Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. But the movie didn’t open in the midwest because–surprise, surprise–it turned mainstream critics off, lacking the sort of lightweight uplift they generally hanker for. After I saw it at the Toronto film festival last September–where Rudolph and Willis said they were proud of having made it even if nobody saw it–it received nominal runs in New York and Los Angeles, cities where viewers and critics are regarded by distributors as being more demographically significant than those in Chicago, and then early this year it came out on video. An aggressive head trip, the movie obviously isn’t for everyone–and some of its potency may be diminished on the home screen–but it’s a lot more bracing and energizing than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
The movie does have a certain amount of star power and occasional bursts of inventive mise en scene, which do a good job of diverting us so we don’t realize that not much else is going on. Two rare occasions when star power and mise en scene function together are Watson’s extended scenes with Warren (a Rudolph regular) and with Nolte. In the scenes with Warren three strategically placed mirrors in a hotel room create so much fascination within the ‘Scope frames that we don’t care whether the characters are saying very much. In the scenes with Nolte, set in a posh club, so much gets said that we don’t care if Rudolph’s mise en scene is show-offy or not. Either way, it’s entirely to Rudolph’s credit in these sequences that I forgot about other movies, as I did during just about all of Breakfast of Champions. i
