From the very start, Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind is practically engulfed by a distinctly melancholic mood as Marianne Faithfull’s soulful voice propels the title track, backed by a plaintive, minimalist sax and piano combo that sounds like it’s coming from a distant back-alley jazz bar somewhere in the film’s rain-soaked metropolitan setting. Dominated by stark shadows and smoky, diffuse lighting, the opening image of a man, Hawk (Kris Kristofferson), exiting prison dressed in a matching black fedora and trench coat instantly clues us in to the film’s neo-noir roots. Asked if he needs anything, Hawk quips “I wouldn’t say no to a woman or a job”—a snarky, self-deprecating and vaguely misogynistic remark that puts him squarely amongst the many gruff, world-weary noir anti-heroes who’ve caught a string of bad breaks and still find the willpower to grind out a living, legal or not, in the big city. But as the film proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear that Rudolph isn’t interested merely in replicating or referencing the narrative and visual tropes of noir as he is in mining them for a truly bizarre yet, to these eyes, often inspired blend of earnest romanticism and near-farcical comedy.
Other characters who are soon introduced also seem like they’re pulled straight from the traditional noir playbook. There’s the sassy, sophisticated yet burned-one-time-too-many-times waitress, Wanda (Geneviève Bujold), whose tumultuous romantic past with Hawk leaves her with a soft spot for the drifter. There’s a beautiful woman in trouble, Georgia (Lori Singer), a young mother, whose husband, Coop (Keith Carradine), gets sucked into a life of crime and becomes overwhelmed by all the temptations that come with it. And, of course, there’s a powerful crime boss, Hilly Blue, who controls every aspect of the city’s underworld from within the shadows.
It all sounds very familiar, even cliched, on paper, yet the fact that Hilly is played by Divine (yes, that Divine) and the metropolis in question in called Rain City are but two of the small, yet numerous, idiosyncratic twists on the formula that make Trouble in Mind more than just another typical neo-noir. Rather, Rudolph’s film is deeply weird, occasionally vexing and always alluring, and with its offbeat, subversive humor and collection of oddball characters (with names like Spike, Rambo and Solo), it feels like it must have been based on, or at least inspired by, a graphic novel (although it wasn’t) that was filtered through the hypnagogic logic and aesthetic of a dream.
Trouble in Mind’s narrative proper is relatively straightforward, primarily concerning the love triangle that develops between Hawk, Georgia and Coop. All the while, it brims with the conflicting impulses of hopefulness and despair, yearning and greed that pervade the city. In Rain City, everyone is just trying to scrape their way through life, fighting against the intensely disorienting feelings of loneliness and alienation that seem to spread through town with the force and speed of a bullet. Yet, for as sincere and heartfelt as Rudolph’s depiction of this gloomy milieu and the lost and longing people who wander about it is, there’s a great deal of artifice at play in the film as well, which creates a distancing effect not unlike that found in early Godard films, particularly his genre riffs like Band of Outsiders and Alphaville.
Many of the establishing shots are, in fact, of constructed miniatures of Rain City, while some of genuinely bizarre hair styles and fashion choices look more like they’re from an ‘80s sci-fi film than a neo-noir. There’s also a number of genuinely strange, though quite funny, running jokes, from the amusingly odd father-son dynamic between Hilly Blue, whom Divine makes equally terrifying and hilarious, and his doofy underling, Rambo (Dirk Blocker), to the escalating ridiculousness of each of Coop’s new haircuts as he becomes further sucked into the criminal underworld. One might expect such broad humor and artifice to undercut the raw, emotional power and sincerity of the film’s portrait of doomed love and redemption, but Rudolph manages to delicately balance the disparate tones to the point that the absurdity, tragedy and eroticism manage to serve one another in an unexpectedly symbiotic manner.
This is, in part, because of the film’s uniformly terrific performances, from Bujold and Kristofferson’s more subdued turns, which help to keep the film grounded in a recognizable reality, or Divine’s and Carradine’s, whose almost clownish performances brilliantly lampoon the goofy excesses of the criminal lifestyle. But Trouble in Mind works so well primarily because of the enveloping, rapturous dreamlike atmosphere Rudolph and cinematographer Toyomichi Kurita conjure, allowing the film to have one foot planted in the real and the other in fantasy in a manner that constantly blurs the line between the two.
In this respect, the film is even more reminiscent of David Lynch than Godard. It’s the rare film that can have its cake and eat it too, fully investing in the emotional arcs of its characters, while also remaining acutely aware of the fact that the reality they’re living in is one that is fully constructed. But even though Rain City is clearly a highly fictitious rendition of Seattle, life within it is so vividly, meticulously and poetically rendered that the outcomes truly matter. And as such, so does Rudolph’s final sentiment that even in a town as dreary and ruthless as Rain City, the sun eventually breaks through the clouds.
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