FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved
| Film by Julie Pithers IN DREAMS In Dreams is a far better picture than its tawdry, pedestrian "thriller" ads would have you believe, but a far worse picture than the talent surrounding it should have made. Directed and co-written by Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), we start off underwater in a town that was flooded to make a reservoir. Judging by the amount of personal belongings floating around the lake, it looks like they were given a two-minute warning before the dam engineers opened the floodgates. While it is an intriguing setting for the audience to look at, the new townspeople don’t seem to know a thing about the old town. There isn’t even a ghost story going around about the boy left tied to his bed when the town was submerged. Until there’s a psycho in town – killing little girls – and he appears in our heroine Clair’s (last name Voyant?) dreams. At this point, the dialogue is so real, the characters – even the small roles – are so full and the visual style is so arresting, you’re willing to go along for the ride. But that ride turns into a train trip. The rails are laid out and, by God, we’re gonna stay on them. The doggedly determined tension is only broken by Annette Bening’s terrific acting. She plays the dreamer, Clair, with an honest, and sometimes funny, madness and realistic reaction to what is happening to her. But what is happening to her is never explained. The killer has the ability to enter her dreams and the added feature of entering her computer. The dreams themselves, though striking, with reds ripping through the black-and-white, are without twist or turn. They tromp undeterred to the killer and show us his evil doings and some of his surroundings. Of course, all of Clair’s information is discounted, even after lives are taken as described earlier in her dreams. Stephen Rea plays her plodding psychiatrist, whose only job is to explain to the dimmer members of the audience exactly what is happening. With the odd exception of a New York accent, his performance is numbingly familiar. Clair’s husband, played by Aidan Quinn, gives a nice regular-guy performance, but without the screen time to react to all of the madness surrounding him. Now the killer – I’m not giving a thing away by telling you this – is played by Robert Downey Jr. Since we only once get a quick point of view camera shot from one of his victims, he doesn’t seem that threatening. He just seems kinda sad. He takes a pinch of Norman Bates and a smattering of Hannibal Lecter and comes up with a cranky, mom-hating psychotic. Granted, he has a point, but Downey doesn’t fill in the blanks to make him a really despicable, frightening killer that makes you crave a little cold revenge. In Dreams fills the screen with beautiful details of everything with the exception of the plot. There is no moment where you think: "Phew. Things are going to be okay.... Omigod! No they’re not!!" They’re consistently not okay. The final litmus test: the person who is usually clinging to me like a lab monkey at these types of movies didn’t hide behind his popcorn bag once. |
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