All sorts of wild things are going on in the bedroom of Claire Cooper (Annette Bening), but not necessarily the kind of action you might suspect. For one thing, every time she and husband Paul (Aidan Quinn) get hot and heavy, Claire zones out and has disturbing visions of little girls in danger, spooky orchards and menacing strangers, none of which puts her in the mood for love.
Is Claire a modern-day Cassandra or a garden-variety kook? "In Dreams" eventually gets around to revealing the answer, but by then it's doubtful anyone will care, since we've already seen Claire attempt suicide by driving off a bridge, desperately struggle to push what looks like 20 pounds of apples down her garbage disposal; answer the phone with a hysterical "leave me alone!"; hurl a computer monitor out the window after being spooked by a mysterious message; and cause a multi-car pile-up after prancing into the middle of a busy road.
Suffice to say, she's not exactly your typical lovable heroine.
Then again, "In Dreams" was directed and co-written by Neil Jordan, whose movies ("The Crying Game," "The Butcher Boy") usually dance on the cutting edge. This one, unfortunately, quickly waltzes off into Looneyville, despite a tantalizing set-up and various themes pilfered from "Don't Look Now," "Psycho" and "Silence of the Lambs."
After awhile, the picture becomes so patently absurd all you can do is laugh, as our girl Claire finds herself locked in a padded cell and telepathically tortured by a cross-dressing mystery man (Robert Downey Jr.) with a fondness for obscure nursery rhymes and raggedy clothes that make him look like a refugee from a dinner-theater production of "Oliver!" Bening and Downey, perhaps forgetting they're in one of those new-fangled "talkies," recklessly indulge in the kinds of outrageous facial expressions not seen onscreen since the last chapter of "The Perils of Pauline" unspooled.
Though "In Dreams" is easily the worst film Jordan has ever been associated with - beating out "High Spirits," which featured Daryl Hannah as an Irish ghost in what looked like a plastic trash bag - it's full of vivid images: golden Japanese lanterns, emerald-tinted stained-glass windows, crimson bedcovers. It's a rainbow of ravishing colors, but the crock it leads to is decidedly not filled with gold. James Sanford
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