DREAM WITH THE FISHES
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 1997 David N. Butterworth/The Summer Pennsylvanian
Rating: **1/2 (Maltin scale)
When you know you're going to die, the food looks better but you can't smell it.
That's just one of the many bittersweet observations about death in "Dream With the Fishes," writer Finn Taylor's offbeat directorial debut. An official selection at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the film can easily be described as "promising." Viewers with little sympathy for missed opportunities, however, are likely to be more interested in Finn's *next* project.
"Dream With the Fishes" is pretty quirky. Much of its quirkiness is drawn from the fact that its lead characters, Terry (a nervous, voyeuristic dweeb solidly played by David Arquette) and Nick (awkwardly realized by Brad Hunt), are both close to death. When Nick--who's dying of some unspecified disease--first meets Terry, Terry is about to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. Rather than talking him out of it, Nick suggests a less messy but ultimately unsuccessful alternative, and their evolving friendship leads to a bizarre pact: if Terry will help Nick live out his fantasies before his time is up, Nick will return the favor by killing him.
Taylor could have gone on a shopping spree with this setup. Instead, he tries to balance the story with a combination of offbeat and serio-tragic episodes. The quirky ones work: the two engage in some late night nude bowling with a couple of hookers, for example. The script's more serious turns, unfortunately, don't. When Nick returns to his childhood home in order to make good on his estranged relationship with his father, their conversation deteriorates into embarrassing cro-magnon hijinks. It's obvious that Taylor is less comfortable with these scenes of domestic reconciliation than he is with his characters doing--and talking about--wacky things.
A lot of the ground is familiar or just plain stolen (including a lottery sequence lifted straight out of a "Full House" episode). A psychic down at Fisherman's Wharf tells Nick "you will be given the job of protecting all the fishes." This results in him, off-camera, stealing a fish, just the one fish, from the local aquarium and letting it loose in the sea--huh?. Often Nick asks Terry about fulfilling *his* fantasies too, but the best Terry can come up with is "all you can eat Cracker Smacks." A strange response from a man we've already witnessed spying on Nick's tattoo artist girlfriend, Liz (Kathryn Erbe) and other sad women through binoculars.
Grainily photographed (at least in the beginning; for some reason the graininess disappears about halfway through the film--perhaps this is what the Sundance people mean by a "lean style"), "Dream With the Fishes" offers a wonderful soundtrack of tunes by the likes of the Waterboys, Squirrel Nut Zippers, and Sun Volt that, unlike many pre-packaged indie song scores, actually fits the mood. Taylor also employs the splendid Cathy Moriarty as Nick's Aunt Elise, a faded dancing queen, but her presence is another example of unrealized promise.
Auspicious is too strong a word to describe the director's first effort, for "Dream With the Fishes" gets by less on what might have been and more on its implicit assurances of what's to come.
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@mail.med.upenn.edu
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