Just as a funky experiment, we should raise an entire generation of men whose only exposure to the opposite sex is the film Women in Trouble, and see how they come out as a result. Will they hate women? Fear them? Or will they be, as I was, almost totally repulsed by them, and feeling that if this is a truly representative work, that women should not be dated, talked to, or trusted under any circumstances. Fortunately, I know a bunch of women, and can safely say that Women in Trouble is another thing: totally and unerringly false.
For the first part, there isn’t much of a plot to encapsulate in a synopsis; instead, the film thinks of itself as a sort of Altman by way of Almodovar hybrid, throwing characters and storylines around disparately as if they were different colors in a Pollock painting (that makes it sound better than it is; I just can't think of a crappy artist who paints that way). Elektra Luxx (Carla Gugino) is a porn star who just found out that she’s pregnant. She gets stuck in an elevator with Doris (Connie Britton); since it’s hot out, they are both naturally forced to take all of their clothes off. Far away on an airplane, Cora (Marley Shelton) is receiving oral sex from British rocker Nick Chapel (Josh Brolin, in one of the most campily embarrassing roles that a major star has had in recent years), only for him to be knocked unconscious when the plane encounters turbulence. Still further on, Holly Rocket (Adrianne Palicki) and Bambi (Emmanuelle Chriqui) run into Maxine (Sarah Clarke), all of whom are escaping man-related problems of their own. In the middle of everything is Charlotte (Isabella Gutierrez), an adolescent girl who can apparently see the future (this is naturally written off as precocious). All of this takes place over the course of one day, Magnolia-style, and is bound together by one single thematic thread: that these are women (you guessed it) in trouble.
And what kind of trouble, you might be intellectually curious enough to ask, would this be? Well, the kind that they damn well seem to be getting themselves into. Pretty much every single character is flighty, a little dumb, and totally subject to the whims of her ever-changing moods (which almost all have to do with the way that she feels about some man). If the fact that it’s nearly impossible to tell one character from another didn’t tell you enough about this film’s sexual politics (and I'm not exaggerating, they're pretty much all chesty blonds), consider this little nugget from the Wikipedia plot synopsis: 'then the husband a woman therapist, Maxine (Sarah Clarke) makes him unfaithful to her'. Translated roughly into English, I’m pretty sure that means that she was to blame for her husband committing adultery. Unless I missed something truly major (and it’s happened before), it’s safe to say that writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez’s views on femininity don’t expand much beyond its warping for use as a comedic centerpiece. Sure, there are long scenes of presumably empowering ‘girl talk’ (a lot of it distressingly Tarantino-lite: there’s a bit here about drummers who were also song writers), but what are we to make of a long monologue in which a character tearfully reminisces about receiving oral sex from a dog (with particular emphasis on her sadness that her mom then gave the dog away, almost as if she thought of herself as a modern version of Janis Ian's 'Society’s Child'). The scene is painfully earnest, almost recalling the Holocaust recollections of Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice. If this is how Gutierrez portrays women respectfully, you’re almost curious what it’s like when he’s making fun of them (there’s plenty of opportunity to find out; this is the first in a proposed trilogy).
But all of that is beside the main point, which is that for the most part the film is just plain incompetent. Shots are poorly framed (it’s almost as if the only requisite feature at any given time was that breasts are featured), scenes are poorly staged, and major stars come and go without having made the slightest impression. So, actually, I guess I do feel like I know what would happen if we only exposed boys to this: we’d have a generation of novelists.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Deleted Scenes
Spanish Subtitles
Teaser Trailers
"Women In Trouble (Blu-ray)" is on sale February 16, 2010 and is rated R. Comedy, Drama. Written and directed by Sebastian Gutierrez. Starring Carla Gugino, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Josh Brolin, Simon Baker, Adrianne Palicki, Marley Shelton, Connie Britton, Sarah Clarke.
