Ellen Barkin was on “Inside the Actor’s Studio” a while back and they were going over her career. Along comes the subject of Man Trouble, a film that the host James Lipton tells her “didn’t really work.” You know, when James Lipton says that your movie “doesn’t really work,” you know indefinitely that you have a real honking piece of shit on your hands. Wasn’t this the guy who claimed that Innerspace was one of his personal favorite movies and practically put the only somewhat unfairly maligned Waterworld on the level of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance? Brown noser Lipton’s praise may not be worth much, but similarly his criticism, no matter how modest, is cause for concern.

Man Trouble is accordingly an utterly indefensible film. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a mule, bred for no other reason than to support heavy labor, and left sterile and void of any intrinsic aesthetic value. Man Trouble exists for no other reason than to fill up a two-hour slot in Encore Love Channel’s empty schedule, to pad out the catalog of your local video store. They don’t intend anybody to see it, understand, they just can’t have a video store consisting of nothing else but new releases. Man Trouble exists for no other reason than to have some sort of strip of film to run though the projector on one of the ten screens of the multiplex. They do, after all, want to maintain their status as multiplexes. The movie’s very existence stands as some sort of monument to the excesses of the Hollywood economic superpower. Millions of dollars have been spent on a film that nobody will ever care to watch, that nobody could ever care to watch. Man Trouble is Hollywood’s answer to business and farm subsidies. It’s one of those pictures that exist for no other reason than to help keep the industry alive.

Basically, the story involves Ellen Barkin as an opera singer getting off a messy divorce with her conductor. When she gets home one night she sees that her house has been broken into, but nothing is stolen. Does somebody want to kill her? She decides to hide out in her sister’s house until things blow over. She still doesn’t feel very safe though, and so she decides to purchase a guard dog from Jack Nicholson. They fall in love, and gradually discover that she may be implicated in a plot by her sister’s ex-husband to steal a manuscript for a tell-all book that reveals all his embarrassing secrets. That’s basically the film, although I am suppressing the revelation of a surprise twist that develops for no other reason than to burn film and make this feature-length.

In addition to being dull and wasteful, the film is racist and misogynistic. This, in itself, would not necessarily be reprehensible. I actually felt sort of challenged by last year’s Bad Boys II because of its sexism and racism. It was dark and disturbing, and worked on a visceral pulp level. Bad Boys II is not good for you, but it sure as hell delivers the goods and that makes it far superior to Man Trouble. Complaining about Bad Boys II being racist or misogynistic is about as useful as attacking “Manchu Terror” from the adventure magazines in the '40s for the same. The backlash against the picture cannot exactly be completely written off as the elitist ravings of the out-of-touch, liberal critical community. But the arguments are at some level founded on the faulty premise that good art must be enriching and may only placate the least destructive of our fantasies. Unquestionably, Bad Boys II feeds into the egos of white American men. (The hero of the piece is played by Will Smith, who is black enough to carry a violently macho bravado and white enough to provide a straightman to the Stepin Fetchit-esque mugging of his partner Martin Lawrence.) But at least the racist/sexist attitudes of Bad Boys II are realized and celebrated. The film is like a scream to reassert the dominance of the White Man, attacking the Ku Klux Klan more for being an underground terrorist organization than for its actual attitudes. It seems to be saying that the only real vehicle for achieving the pleasures of racial/sexual domination is through law-and-order institutionalism. But this is turning into a review of an interesting movie, which I guess is my point. The hatefulness of Man Trouble is not an attack against liberal values; it's utterly naive of liberal values. It takes these attitudes for granted. They're just there. Man Trouble isn't as much an adequately diseased film as it is a lazy one. Maybe it's a result of my indoctrination early on in my upbringing of strong Protestant values, but it seems to me that cynicism is justifiable to an extent, and cruelty is justifiable to an extent, but sheer laziness is not. There are few qualities that I loathe more in a film than laziness. Visually and thematically, Man Trouble is a corpse of a film; there isn't a drop of blood in the picture and not a bead of sweat. Nobody making this film at any point seemed to want to make a great film.

The racism and sexism in the picture is symptomatic of this. These -isms are, at best, a cheap attempt at mining humor from placid material. At worst, they stem from the hate of a primitive morality, the hatred of the 1930s more than the 1940s. It's not the racism of a mindset that seeks to actively suppress, it's a naive racism that believes that this is the way that things are and this is the way that it will always be. Essentially what we have here is what we had with Grease. It’s a picture that is both morally reprehensible and lacking in any filmmaking excitement. There is literally no possible reason to look at it.

Jack Nicholson begins the film at marriage counseling with his wife, an Asian woman that he calls "Iwo Jima." The movie thinks that this is hilarious. Later in the film, his therapist even calls her "Iwo." Her real name is Adele, but we are disclosed this information only once and eventually evaporates from our memory. (The film does have the good taste to address her as Adele in the credits, but what's the point?) She justifiably rejects the shabby treatment that she gets from Nicholson, but the film reduces her to an uber-shrew. Not only is she the wife, she’s also Asian, the worst kind of wife you can have. Her money is invested in his guard dog business, which is failing, and she wants to close it down and build a nail salon. I guess she never learned how to run a laundry back in Shangri-La. We gather that the guard dog business may be the only place where he can be a man again. He feels natural and comfortable in his place. Nicholson meets Barkin after her house has been broken into and she needs a guard dog. At there first meeting, in a considerably repugnant scene that grows more repugnant the more you think about it, he explains to her how to avoid being attacked. She has to walk with confidence and to know what she is doing, but she “can’t walk like a dyke,” because if she’s isn’t at all feminine she will be seen as a target for predators. Barkin needs him, and this makes him feel important and valued as a man.

The movie makes sure that we understand the dog symbolism early on in the opening credits, where we see a cartoon of a dog with shades and a Jack Nicholson grin. Nicholson’s dogs are mean motherfuckers. Adele’s are little yappers, annoying and unthreatening. Her whiny, shrill admonishments burrow into Nicholson’s head and slowly eat away at the lining in his skull. We can just sense the headaches that she is giving Nicholson. She’s a castrator; the longer that Nicholson spends with her the more he rots away. Adele’s Asian woman-ness justifies the love affair that he has with Ellen Barkin.

Barkin plays an upper-middle class WASP in the picture; she’s smart but weak, vanilla and girly, possessing none of the ethnic aggression of Adele. She’s feminine, but is unable to work herself up to the froth and so Nicholson can use her. Both the performance and the character go against the grain of Barkin’s persona as a tough and sexy femme fatale, and that is possibly what attracted her to the role. It seems to be a worthy effort, but it doesn’t work at all and it’s sort of depressing to watch. When Nicholson tells her not to be a dyke and she obeys him, it’s sort of disappointing. Barkin never really comes out of her shell; she’s never anything less but the good girl. She bites her attacker in one sequence, and later tells off some of the thugs that have been chasing her, but the film seems to see these transgressions as sort of precocious and cute. Try to imagine Goldie Hawn doing this or maybe Meg Ryan and you get a taste of how it plays and how frustrating it is to see Barkin doing it. People wonder why a picture with Jack Nicholson and Ellen Barkin didn’t work out; it’s because Jack is Jack and Ellen is not Ellen. They would have been good in a Johnny Handsome-esque noir thriller where they double-cross each other and exchange hard dialogue. I’m not sure any woman could play this role, as it’s utterly thankless, but putting Barkin in this material feels especially hateful.

You see, if the film had Barkin and Nicholson be equals, that would have been sexy. If Barkin was giving into Nicholson, submitting to his degradations despite her better judgments like Meg Ryan to Mark Ruffalo in In the Cut, that would be sexy too. But there isn’t anything sexy about Man Trouble; it seems to only have a slight, superficial understanding of the horrors and joys of the politics of sex. There is a feeble attempt at feminist empowerment at the end of the film where, having almost been murdered by the secret surprise killer but saved by Nicholson, she goes on a tirade about how she will never be used by men again. She says something about not “wagging her tail” for them anymore. We don’t buy it. Right after this tirade, Nicholson tells her that he loves her and she runs to him and they embrace. This happens so sudden after the tirade that we realize that the tirade was meant for laughs and not to provide Barkin with a moment of triumph or empowerment. It exists so we can laugh at how crazy she is acting. The film’s social hierarchy seems to be that white men rule over white women who rule over colored women.

Indeed, the precociousness of female empowerment isn’t limited to just Barkin. The filmmakers introduce a very stupid running joke about a new slasher movie that is being advertised on television. The girls are watching a talk show where the director and the starlet are the guests. She says how the sexuality was never gratuitous, and they filmed chronologically so that the scene where she is running through the street naked with stab wounds all over her directly followed the gangrape scene. Har-de-har. Barkin shows some disgust at this, but her friend is enthused by it. Neither turns it off. The scene seems to exist only so the filmmakers can brag about how badly they can abuse their female characters and how much they are willing to take it, how their attempts to subvert male oppression are half-hearted and even sort of cute. “Aw," they’re saying, “she thinks she’s people.”

Somewhat less alarming, but symptomatic of the problems in the film, is another stupid running joke where Barkin’s guard dog gets a crush on her Mexican maid and is constantly on the lookout for her so he can hump her. This is the sort of joke, like all of the jokes in Man Trouble, that is too smarmy and obvious to be very funny. The maid can’t speak English, though, and so the film is able to easily turn her into a joke and marginalize her as a human being. One of the great stereotypes of the movies is the sassy maid. We read Tartuffe in high school English class, and in describing the characters the teacher said that the maid in the play was just like “The Nanny." Mammy from Gone with the Wind was, along with Rhett Butler, the smartest character in the movie and the only other one that saw through Scarlett O’Hara’s bullshit. And so this kind of character is pretty old, but it exists for a reason. The racism of Gone with the Wind is somewhat moderated by giving Mammy a sort of consciousness. And in purely class-conscious terms, our sympathies rest with the help and we see that it’s the rich who are satirized. Man Trouble subverts this stereotype and it does so in the name of evil. There is a scene where Barkin asks the maid, in slow condescending English with a few Spanish words thrown in, if she has seen her sister’s manuscript. The maid shyly shakes her head no, and says that she hasn’t seen it in Spanish. The movie could have scored an easy if predictable laugh if, afterwards, it just held on the maid after Barkin left and have her say in Spanish with English subtitles something under her breath like, “What a bitch!” The film refuses to give us such a scene though. The maid is timid and easily dominated by Barkin. There is a good scene early in the film where we first see her leaving the house for the weekend with her son and Barkin stops her. She doesn’t want her to leave because she can’t stay in the house alone. The son nearly but not quite sneers, “Even she gets a day off!” That’s as close as we get to racial empowerment as well.

With just a slight twist, by announcing that it finds its characters repugnant and finding humor at their expense, the film could have worked. But the film is awfully primitive; it doesn’t seem to have the intelligence to transcend its storyline and apply a toothy coating of irony to the material. It treats these people like the heroes and keeps the marginalized minorities in the margins. And the film is pure storytelling and no point of view. Primitive, primitive, primitive. Level one filmmaking.

Man Trouble developed a reputation of being a high-profile bomb upon its release in July of 1992. The script, by Carole Eastman, went through quite a few directors including Jonathan Demme and Lawrence Kasdan, and quite a few male leads including Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino. Eventually, Bob Rafelson took the directorial duties. Eastman and Rafelson worked on Five Easy Pieces together with Nicholson. In addition to Barkin and Nicholson, the picture also featured Paul Mazursky and a bored Harry Dean Stanton, not to mention the considerably more ominous Beverly D’Angelo and Michael McKean. It was a high-profile deal. And yet the studio, 20th Century Fox, refused to screen it for critics, boldly stating that they believed that Nicholson’s star power would secure a decent opening weekend. It didn’t. The final gross of the picture was a measly $4.1 million. Rafelson has stuck around and has continued to make movies that nobody sees including House on Turk Street (?) and Blood and Wine, considered to be an underrated gem by most critics. The stars of Man Trouble of course healed, but Eastman did not. She never made another film after Man Trouble and died last month at the age of 69, after a longtime battle with an unknown illness. Man Trouble was her first film since 1975’s The Fortune, another big bomb with Jack Nicholson, and marked the first time that she was credited under her real name as opposed to the pseudonym Adrien Joyce. Man Trouble also marked her first attempt at producing.

The history and background of Man Trouble makes it sound like it was some sort of grandiose Frankenstein monster that got away from its creator and has wreaked havoc on the minds and souls of filmgoers. But that doesn’t describe the film at all. It’s just a nothing film. There doesn’t seem to have been any passion at all in it. It’s workmanship-like mediocrity is the only thing that keeps it from spiraling into the awesome badness of something like Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, Wing Commander or even the recent Hollywood Homicide, movies that aren’t so bad that they're good but are so bad that you can actually see through time as you experience them.

Eastman vocally expressed her displeasure after the release of the film and announced that her professional relationship with Rafelson was over. I wonder if she intended the film to be one of the great atrocities of the 1990s and possibly of human civilization, a sort of revenge against the system that kept her out of work for seventeen years. You have to be filled with hate to make a film with this “Iwo Jima” character and that talk show scene. Or, on the brighter side, maybe her original script had all those things that I found missing from the finished product, like a sense of irony and a consciousness of the racism of the characters and the masochism of the women. But Rafelson flattens everything out. The film is set in Los Angeles; which Rafelson turns into a neon photocopy of a Monet. It’s all sunny and quiet Sunday afternoons. There is a cheap plastic peacefulness to the picture. It’s like we’re stuck in a third-rate day care center. Rafelson injects some sort of hyper-banality into the very fabric of the film. He hasn’t only drained L.A. of its pulp, he’s gotten rid of the flavor too, leaving behind only bright orange water. A hundred minutes in this universe is positively soul-crushing.

And visually, of course, Rafelson is pretty much click-and-shoot. The film isn’t a movie and it isn’t television; it plays like that horrid synthesis, the TV-movie. It’s like a remnant of the post-Chuck Barris, pre-Fox Network era, when television was more no taste than bad taste. But again, if there was some sort of consciousness about the banality of this environment, it may have worked. Rafelson has taken a terrible script, and in an attempt to save it or not, has made it completely straight, refusing to infuse any intelligence, feeling or risk into it.

Today, some twelve years after its release, nobody ever thinks about Man Trouble as being one of the worst films ever made. Its legacy is simply as a “mistake," or as “unsuccessful." And that, in itself, is sort of repugnant. Eastman said that she would have rather seen the film ripped to shreds by the critics than swept under the rug, but sweeping it under the rug is exactly what Rafelson and 20th Century Fox have succeeded in doing. Eastman is denied a true career suicide, filmgoers are denied the sensation of suffering, and Encore Love Stories is given something to show at ten o'clock in the morning on Monday. And life goes on, I suppose.