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Grade: D

Verdict: The trick's on you if you buy a ticket.

Details: Starring Emily Watson and Nick Nolte. Rated R for some profanity, sexuality and violence. 1 hour, 57 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: You don't see many movies these days that slow down to let their characters just talk. At least, not movies without subtitles.

The characters in "Trixie" spend a lot of time talking. The problem is, they open their mouths and out comes garbage. You wish they'd just shut up. Or, as somebody in the movie might say, "Zip your lid on it and shut your pie plate."

The fine actress Emily Watson plays the title role. Though she's personified a slow-witted sex kitten ("Breaking the Waves"), an unhinged musician ("Hilary and Jackie") and a suffering Irish mum ("Angela's Ashes"), she has her biggest challenge here. That's because it's not a character she's playing, it's a quirk.

Trixie is an eccentric, gum-chewing would-be detective who takes an undercover job as a casino security guard, looking for pickpockets but hoping to stumble on a real criminal case. Produced by Robert Altman and set in the laid-back lushness of Vancouver, "Trixie" primes us for an oddball spin on the detective genre, something like Altman's own revisionist version of Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye." So far, so good.

Then, Trixie speaks.

Writer-director Alan Rudolph ("Afterglow") fills her mouth with malapropisms that are meant to be adorable. When Trixie gets a hunch, she says she's relying on her "institution." She tells a new friend, "You can't just sit there like a sore thumb." And when a character says, "C'est la vie," Trixie replies, "Lah vee."

There are lot more where those came from. Trixie never becomes a believable character, because she's stuck being the literal mouthpiece of useless wordplay. It's like somebody at a cocktail party telling the same bad joke over and over, thinking it will be funny the 30th or 40th time.

That's not all. Rudolph surrounds Watson with quirky folk who become infected by her speech. Nathan Lane plays a casino lounge singer who, between celebrity impressions, tells her, "We're all tap dancers in the canoe of life." Nick Nolte turns up as a crooked senator who rambles on in impenetrable doublespeak. His bogs of dialogue are reportedly culled from transcripts of real smoke-blowing politicos, but knowing the in-joke doesn't make his scenes endurable.

The ramshackle central mystery concerns a scheming developer (Will Patton), Nolte, a curvy, aging-girly chanteuse (Lesley Ann Warren, still vamping after all these years) and the sleazy-sexy womanizer (Dermot Mulroney) who tries to seduce Trixie. When a murder occurs, ol' Trix takes the case.

Watson works overtime trying to turn the role's tics into a three-dimensional portrait, and she succeeds in investing the role with a mix of pluck and lonely vulnerability. Rudolph stages a raucous restaurant scene between Nolte and a too-obliging would-be starlet (Brittany Murphy), and there's a gunfight sequence that has both the shock and comic clumsiness of something that could happen in reality. But the grace notes aren't enough to salvage a movie that wears out your patience before the main plot even kicks in.

Watson nails the core problem of "Trixie" when her character quips, "Nobody's human." Well, not in this movie, anyway.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

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