Trouble in Mind (1985)

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Trouble in Mind is a VERY interesting movie, and self-consciously so. Somewhere between gratuitously-quirky and a flawed masterpiece, everything about this movie is just a little off.And that is also its charm. An exotic casting choice results in a character that is more intriguing than convincing; Another character transforms, gradually, completely beyond recognition without comment. Alternate-Noir atmosphere in a different Pacific Northwest. A creatively-bizarre murder and my nomination for the funniest shoot-out in film history.And lots of atmosphere. A moody Mark Isham soundtrack with an even moodier Marianne Faithful partially channelling Billie Holiday. Rain and rain and more rain that does not appear to have required any equipment. And ending in a lingering, scenic shot that has nothing to do with the story but meshes exquisitely with the mood and music, and seems as if it was orchestrated by mother nature exclusively for the film crew. I can't tell whether the weather was incredibly cooperative, or if Alan Rudolph just knew exactly how and when to use it.The overall effect is a unique but cohesive viewing experience that sticks with you long after the movie is over. It strives, a little too pretentiously, to be quirky, but it is also beautifully humanist.

Its a long time ago, but I remember doing the PR for this for its UK release and taking Alan Rudolph around to press interviews. one or two of in the agency loved this film, and couldn't understand it when the National Critics seemed not to get it. We organised a dinner for them with Rudolph, and I remember being astonished by the lack of enthusiasm. All these years later I have just made my first feature (Which, whilst I am sure is not a patch on Trouble in Mind, takes as its purpose being unusual and (Hopefully) beautiful. I look forward to the DVD of trouble in mind. You just have to be on the wavelength of this beautiful film, and to remember that one day, people come to appreciate a film....but it can take 20 years.

I love this movie. Like Robert Altman, alumni Alan Rudolph is a great director of actors. Caradine, Kristofferson, Divine and Bujold are strong and magnetic; they give extraordinary performances. But the most brave and terrific is Lori Singer. I loved her in "Fame" and I loved her acting in "Short Cuts". Not only she is an incredible beauty and a talented artist, but she is only a sensitive actress. In "Trouble in mind" she is incredible and she was nominated for an Independet Spirit Award for her powerful performance. I hope she will star in a new movie as soon as possible. I hope too that she will star again in a movie by Alan Rudolph, which is a maestro.

This film is perhaps the ONLY film to "document" what life was probably like for the vast majority of young people in working class America in the late seventies and early eighties, when a true sense of bizarreness reigned in big cities all across the country. This was the world that David Bowie, Kiss, disco and cocaine had made for everyone who had to "get out of the house at night". It was also a statement about how rough life was for anybody trying to make their way in the world during that period, where inflation was rampant and jobs were VERY difficult to come by.This situation leads one of the characters, Koop, played by Keith Carradine, to join forces with a paranoid but educated and shady black guy by the name of Solo in a diner owned by Genevieve Bujold's character, Wanda. Also frequenting the diner, which he also lives over, is ex-cop Hawk, newly released from prison, played by Kris Kristofferson. The two clash, as Koop descends into a life of crime with Solo, trying to feed his wife and baby while Hawk develops an eye for his young wife, played by Lori Singer.The mood of this movie has many parts: equal parts weird, compassionate, exposition, self-consciously fashionable, and stylish. It captures the zeitgeist of the period between 1975 and 1982 perfectly...the desperation of young people, especially POOR young people, to get a taste of the glitzy good life and to simply survive in a world that it is too easy to realize really IS cold and cruel! Alan Rudolph's art director should have won an Oscar for his work on this film, as it captures the presumed time it was set in perfectly. Rudolph himself deserves kudos too, for giving the world a chronicle of the weird world of new wave-disco era, big city America. Bujold, Carradine, Morton, Singer and even Kristofferson are good in it as well.This is the middle one of three great movies Rudolph produced in the mid-to-late eighties that he and his repertoire company, (usually just Bujold and Carradine,) can be justifiably proud. These are "Choose Me", "The Moderns" and this one. "The Moderns" must be seen to be believed. As good as the mood setting is in "TiM", "The Moderns" walks all over it.Enjoy.