IN DREAMS (director/writer: Neil Jordan; screenwriter: Bruce Robinson/based on the novel "Doll's Eyes" by Bari Wood; cinematographer: Darius Khondji; editor: Tony Lawson; cast: Annette Bening (Claire Cooper), Aidan Quinn (Paul Cooper), Robert Downey Jr. (Vivian Thompson), Paul Guilfoyle (Detective Jack Kay), Katie Sagona (Rebecca Cooper), Stephen Rea (Dr. Silverman), 1999)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Neil Jordan, the director of The Company of Wolves/The Crying Game/Interview With the Vampire/ Butcher Boy, imbues his latest film with an unreal intensity. The nightmarish scenes seem surpassed by cinematography techniques, allowing the story to move into the realm of make believe Hollywood hokum rather than relying on the viewer's imagination to do the job. The Irish-born director, Jordan, whose accomplishments include a few first-class films among some disappointments, only proves here, that the horror thriller, perhaps, is not what he is best suited for. His heavy-handed direction, helped only in spoiling a fine cast from doing what it is capable of. Jordan's idea of a horror thriller, seems to be in letting the heroine to act in a shrill voice, rather than letting the heroine's nightmare and mental breakdown come down as something internally real. If Jordan went down the poetic trail instead of opting for this gobbledy-gook he comes up with, then we might have had a solid film to comment on.
In a small Massachusetts town, a place near where a reservoir covers the remains of "a drowned ghost town," lives the Cooper family, consisting of Claire (Annette Bening), who is a fairy-tale book illustrator, her husband Paul (Aidan), who flies 747 passenger planes, their daughter Rebecca (Katie), who is just a plain sweetheart, and their dog called Dobie, who looks like a mutt and not a Doberman pinscher.
The police in the opening scene are searching the reservoir for the corpse of a little girl who has been abducted by a serial killer. Meanwhile, Claire sits in an idyllic wood setting drawing in her sketchbook in such an agitated state because she sees something that others can't see: something visionary. What she sees, is a recurring bad dream she is having of late, of a child being led by the hand through an orchard. She is so sure of what she sees, that she tells her daughter the police won't find anything there.
Claire is being tormented by the serial killer who has gotten into her head and is feeding her his bad thoughts. Naturally, nobody takes Claire seriously, not her husband (who tries to) or the police (who try not to), but when her daughter is abducted -- in the best scene of the movie, at the elementary-school staging of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," performed by night in a forest -- we see Claire go bonkers. It was the only scene in the movie that was able to convey how believable her panic attacks really are.
Claire is committed to a mental institution and believe it or not, she's in the same cell as the killer who got into her head was once in. He escaped by bludgeoning a nurse to death and now lives with a girl he abducted in a strange lair. The shrink who is treating her, Dr. Silverman (Rea), also doesn't believe her. He thinks she's delusional. I think he's delusional if he thinks he got a real part in this film. His role is so insignificant, even more so than Aidan Quinn's, as to make Stephen Rea, seem less like a star than one of the film's extras.
In any event, Claire escapes from the loony bin, as she attaches her thoughts to the killer and finds her way to him.
The killer appears in the last fifteen or so minutes of this film, and he is none other than the troubled actor Robert Downey Jr., who has been plagued recently by real-life problems. Here, he is playing the role of Vivian Thompson, by making his villain role as campy as he could, managing to give the impression that he is a totally evil pervert, possibly even gay. He is shown committing a few of his murders via flashback. Downey Jr. basically brought a sense of the ridiculous to this role, allowing the film to sink lower than than the ordinary Hollywood horror film usually does. That the killer is an abused child, cannot get the attention it deserves at this belated stage of the film, as his character was never developed, and is played only for cheap thrills and a chance for the performer to go over-the-edge.
The film's intellectual theme, if I can loosely use the word intellectual, is a reversal of "Snow White", as this time the story is not narrated from the child's point of view, but from the mother's. An adult Freudian tale, I suppose. Where the color red sets off horrible visions and apples become omens for terrible things to come. The film just becomes a mess and the acting is constantly shrill. It is a film that can't be saved by good looking photography, or diffuse symbolism, or even by great special effects, but must be viewed wallowing in its own unpleasant reservoir of putrid storytelling.
REVIEWED ON 4/12/2000 GRADE: C-
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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