1985’s Trouble in Mind is a critically-praised 1985 neo-noir recently issued as a limited-run blu-ray from Shout Factory. Ebert gave it his highest rating. The description on the Shout site has little information. I only wish they put the full text from the back of the case on their listing. Consider: “Littered with gangsters and thugs, Rain City almost serves as a side street to human evolution.” What the hell does that mean? I’ve now seen the film and that copy somehow makes even less sense to me now than before I watched it.
It doesn’t seem like the actors in the film know what’s going on, either. Kris Kristofferson seemingly cycles through facial expression without regards to the material, as if this a video game and he’s a non-playable character. Lori Singer looks perpetually lost, which I suspect stems from her appearance being so obviously modelled on Daryl Hannah that the production treats her like a consolation prize when they couldn’t get the real deal.
She’s a hick who has arrived in Rain City with hubby Keith Carradine, who immediately jumps into a life of crime and weird fashion choices until he looks and acts like a Batman villain. Geneviève Bujold runs the café and boarding house to which the main characters gravitate, and her demeanor alternates between bewildered, bored and angry with little motivation I could discern. Maybe she was waiting for David Cronenberg to offer her Dead Ringers, so she could do a movie that was less weird.
And this is one weird movie, though not in the ways I am capable of appreciating. It feels like a dumping ground for ideas from various projects that weren’t brought to fruition. Although taking place in what appears to be what was then the present day, it has characters like Kristofferson that have wondered out of the 1940’s. Similarly, there’s jackbooted thugs everywhere, but this is the US and they represent the fascist government. It’s a little bit like the alternate American from Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, except here this is just window dressing which doesn’t add anything to the plot.
Then again, I’m still wondering what is the plot. There’s various threads, one of which is Kristofferson’s former police officer getting released from prison and unable to return to his old job. There’s Carradine, Singer and her baby, the last of which goes missing just so Kristofferson can put in what appears to be the minimal amount of effort to bring it back and coerce Singer into a relationship. There’s Joe Morton, woefully misused as Carradine’s literal partner-in-crime. He’s a ways away from the unfortunate scientist behind Skynet in T2.
This is a piece that is all quirks, without anything of real substance for those to embellish. In the diner, there’s a mute employee who is always doing some sort of business in the background that distracts from what we should be paying attention to in the foreground. Sometimes, the camera can’t even be bothered to stay focused on the foreground action, such as an extravagant party at a gangster’s mansion in the climatic set piece, where the shot keeps shifting to close-ups of various artworks in the background. I wonder who on the production really wanted to have sex with the artist who made those.
There are even little touches that annoyed me, such as the police cars which inexplicably have four lights on top (two blue, one red and one yellow). Elements such as this are only distractions, without fleshing out the world of the film any better. And I haven’t even addressed the diorama of the city in Kristofferson’s room, which he doesn’t seem to be working on, but which seems to just be growing all on its own. That’s an interesting idea, but it is just another half-based idea here in a picture stuffed to capacity with them.
I primarily took a chance on this film because it has Divine in a small, but important, role as the top gangster in town. This was the only time he appeared in a movie but not in drag. I was honestly surprised he didn’t appear under his birth name, Glenn Milstead. Unfortunately, his performance here is off, but I don’t know how any actors in this were expected to perform any of these barely sketched characters.
Trouble in Mind is one of those films that demonstrates it isn’t enough to be unique or weird if you don’t have a story to tell. There’s no story here, and there’s barely even any characters. It’s the kind of movie where Divine warns a character that those who cross him will have their lungs filled with water, only for us to later see this fulfilled with the person’s corpse floating in a car inexplicably filled with water. Sure, it was unexpected. But it also doesn’t make sense, it isn’t funny and it isn’t clever–all things I could say of almost every second of this picture.
Dir: Alan Rudolph
Starring Kris Kristofferson, Keith Carradine, Lori Singer, Divine
Watched on Shout Factory blu-ray