DIRECTOR
Neil Jordan
SCREENWRITERS
Bruce Robinson
Neil Jordan
based
on the novel Doll's Eyes by
Bari Wood
PRODUCER
Stephen Woolley
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Darius Khondji
MUSIC
Elliot Goldenthal
EDITOR
Tony Lawson
CAST
Annette Bening (Claire Cooper)
Aidan Quinn (Paul Cooper)
Robert Downey Jr. (Vivian Thompson)
Stephen Rea (Dr. Silverman)
Paul Guilfoyle (Detective Jack Kay)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 98m
U.S. release: January 15, 1999
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other Neil
Jordan films
reviewed on this site:
- The
Butcher Boy
- Interview
with the Vampire
- Michael
Collins
|
Neil
Jordan's new thriller In Dreams is unquestionably bad,
but it's not your ordinary bad movie. Jordan piles on the melodrama,
the overacting, the omens and premonitions, the general dingbat
excess, until the screen is full to bursting. Done even slightly
differently, this could have been a glorious purple pleasure
like Dead Again or Dressed to Kill or even Shattered.
Those films were also cluttered pastiches of thriller elements
and wildly implausible plot twists, but they were assembled with
genuine, obsessive love. In Dreams, however, is stuck
in a strange limbo: It's too goofy to be taken seriously, but
it takes itself too seriously to be enjoyably goofy.
The movie starts out at a high pitch and just goes higher, until
it burns itself out at about the halfway mark. Largely responsible
for the film's shrillness is Annette Bening, as a haunted woman
who sees bizarre and threatening future events in her dreams.
Jordan has encouraged Bening to go for broke and turn in a stylized
yet realistic portrait of madness; the problem is, Bening is
too realistic, and not stylized enough, to be fun. She seems
neurotic from the start; she's hard to look at even before
she cracks up. A lot of the time, you're watching a confused,
gifted actress trying to make sense of her role. At that, she's
no more successful than I was.
In Dreams is all plot twists, so I have to suggest
rather than reveal. Opening this teeming Pandora's box of a movie,
we find the following: a submerged town, a mother-fixated killer
(Robert Downey Jr., featured prominently in the ads, has what
amounts to a glorified cameo), apples as symbols of abuse and
portents of doom (the worm in the apple? the apple doesn't fall
far from the tree? what?), a loving dog forced to snack
on someone's face, Stephen Rea attempting some sort of Boston-Bronx
accent (at the very end, we're told the movie is set in Massachusetts),
lip-biting, an excruciating children's rendition of Snow White,
and much more. You get the picture. A giant squirrel or
two would not be out of place here.
As I said: not the ordinary bad movie. If I were in a generous
mood, I might call it an extraordinary bad movie (as opposed
to an extraordinarily bad one). After all, the director is
Neil Jordan, who gave us the brilliant The
Butcher Boy just last year. He also co-wrote the script
with Bruce Robinson, who contributed Withnail & I
and How to Get Ahead in Advertising to the roster of great
British comedies. If you go into In Dreams knowing all
this, you give it the benefit of many doubts, and for
far longer than you really should. Eventually, you get exhausted
trying to suspend your judgment and your disbelief. It's mesmerizingly
awful, but it's still awful.
Photographed by Darius Khondji (Seven),
the movie looks terrific, but it looks terrific in the same way
that Seven looked terrific; the derivative virus of the
script has infected everyone involved, right down to poor Elliot
Goldenthal, Jordan's usual composer, who here swings between
Bernard Herrmann's lush orchestrations and John Carpenter's solemn
piano chords for Halloween.
Jordan has often used songs as fetish objects in his movies (Mona
Lisa, The Crying Game, The Butcher Boy), but
nobody's likely to leave this film humming "Don't Sit Under
the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me." Every director
is entitled to let his judgment go to hell at least once; Jordan
drops his common sense so consistently here that much of In
Dreams is fascinating, in a self-destructive, what-the-hell-was-he-thinking?
way.
The movie is flabbergasting, but it's nowhere near the same league
as the usual bad Hollywood movie (ahem, Patch
Adams). It's off in its own twinkly world, speaking to
us of fairy tales and floods and apples. This high-strung, unstable
thriller has an odd effect, though: this extravagant failure
reinforces Neil Jordan's stature as one of the great modern filmmakers,
if only because even when he makes a bummer, it's difficult to
shrug off. In Dreams nags at you as no merely bad movie
can. |
